Hi Bravo,
Last time I looked, Intel were having problems getting 18A to work properly - very low yield per wafer.
In olden times, Intel would have been able to throw fistfulls (fistsfull) of cash at the problem but now they are strapped for cash, and the sharks are circling. Clearly there has been a backdoor deal with US gvt - Intel is too big to fail. Under the Chips Act, the gov would want IFS to succeed so maybe that's where their investment has gone. Of course, Intel also needs help with AI.
Nvidia was blocked from buying ARM, so this may prevent any merger, but collaboration is possible, it's just that there could be lots of fingers in the pie. Maybe IFS will be hived off - it's already notionally customer-agnostic. This would leave Intel pretty much as it was before IFS in 2024.
As for Akida 3, I see this as being the Rolls-Royce option (aerospace, defence, ...) because of its INT16/FP32 capability. This will take up a lot more wafer real estate per chip, making it much more expensive to make, say >3X. I think Akida 3 will be a specialist high precision option, while Akida 2 will be the "standard" workhorse.
I don't know if 18A is suitable for RadHard.
The advantage of chiplets is that it would make Akida available for a much larger range of applications without needing specialized IP SoC designs/wafer tapeout/production for each customer.
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