Intel amplifies action! Clearwater Forest + Intel 18A, can it stage a final comeback?

     Forget Lunar Lake! If there's one chip family that's critical to Intel's entire turnaround plan, it's the company's upcoming Clearwater Forest Xeon line. This is the first time Intel has shown this chip, and it will be the first mass-produced chip with an 18A process node. Intel CEO Pat Kissinger has said that the 18A node is so important to the company that he has staked the future of the entire company on it.

     While Intel plans to produce other processors with the 18A node, on-time mass production of the Clearwater Forest chip is critical to building customer confidence in Intel's foundry business. This is also the core of Kissinger's strategy to turn around Intel, in order to attract orders from other companies through leading foundry services, and promote the company's recovery. The success of this project means that Kissinger's bold "4-year 5-node" plan is nearing completion, hoping to re-emerge Intel through technological superiority.

     While the release of the Clearwater Forest chip won't be until next year, Intel has already shown it off for the first time at its recent technology tour, and also unveiled its latest Xeon 6 Granite Rapids data center chip. It is exciting to see that the number of cores in Xeon 6 for the first time has matched the level of AMD since the launch of EPYC processors in 2017, showing some competitiveness.

     However, the Xeon 6, while using Intel's "Intel 3" process node, still lags behind AMD's upcoming EPYC Turin processor based on TSMC's 3nm process in process technology. Intel's 18A process is the company's high hopes for the future, looking to surpass TSMC in several key metrics, and through the mass production of Clearwater Forest chips, helping Intel's foundry business gain a foothold and achieve a historic recovery.

     Kissinger's plan relied on maintaining the company's cash flow by contract manufacturing chips for other companies to support Intel's continued development of leading chip technology. However, with Intel's recent cancellation of the 20A node, the importance of the 18A node has become even more prominent. As Kissinger said in an interview six months ago, "I bet the whole company on node 18A."

     If the Clearwater Forest chip is not mass-produced on time and efficiently, Intel may face even greater challenges, and the future of the one-time chip giant will no longer look like it does now. For Intel, the 18A node not only determines the company's own fate, but also whether the United States can maintain the world's leading chip manufacturing capacity.

     However, according to foreign media reports, Intel's 18A process has not passed the test of American chip designer Broadcom. Broadcom received the 18A process wafers from Intel in August, and after careful evaluation by its engineers and senior team, concluded that the process is not yet ready for mass production. This news undoubtedly casts a shadow of uncertainty over whether Intel can smoothly mass-produce 18A processors as planned.In summary, the Clearwater Forest chip carries the hope of Intel's future recovery, and its success or not will directly affect whether Intel can return to the top.