Intel announced a technology roadmap this week that laid out how it plans to achieve "a clear path to process performance leadership by 2025," but analysts are skeptical and think its timeline may be too aggressive.
The firm has faced increasingly fierce competition from the likes of Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC), spurring it to invest $20 billion in building factories in Arizona to manufacture its own chips and start providing manufacturing services for customers, too. It announced Amazon Web Services as its first client for that business and is also partnering with Qualcomm, which will use its process technology.
"We take a conservative view of where we see the competitors to be at that point in time that we're saying, yes, we'll be parity or parity-plus in 2024, and then unquestioned leadership in 2025," Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said at an event on Tuesday.
But for all the new CEO's confidence, CCS Insight director Wayne Lam describes the timeline as "quite aggressive," given Intel's recent production delays.
Forrester VP Glenn O'Donnell expressed wariness about Intel's shot as it bleeds market share to AMD for server chips while manufacturing competitors like Samsung and TSMC are "not sitting still" either.
"Intel's vision is excellent, but can it catch up and even surpass TSMC and others?" O'Donnell said. "We have to dig in more to understand the real answer."
Dan Morgan, trust portfolio senior manager at Synovus, is also taking an optimistically "wait-and-see" stance:
"I take a more positive posture and think that Intel does have the resources to become a domestic foundry and compete against the likes of TSMC and Samsung," Morgan said. "Further, Intel will get its mojo back and work through some of the 10nm production delays and flex it muscles again to regain MS in the PC/Lap-top and server markets. Only time will tell."
Another more superficial change Intel announced was to rename its process nodes to become more consistent with industry norms.
For example, Intel has a 7nm processor, while TSMC and Samsung sell a 5nm processor. Now, it's renaming its 10nm processor to Intel 7 and its 7nm to Intel 4, which is supposed to be equivalent to TSMC and Samsung's 5nm processors.
"Many Intel critics will see this as Intel trying to artificially bend the narrative in its favor," O'Donnell said. "While they certainly want to change the narrative, I don't see evidence that this is artificial. In fact, I found the transparency and candor unusual and positive."
Lam agreed, saying that Intel's naming conventions created the false perception that its chips weren't as powerful as those from TSMC and Samsung.
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