One of the keys to the success of Intel's leadership in advanced lithography process control transistors. Having always one step ahead of its competitors, Intel processors can easily offer more complex - and therefore more efficient - and less energy consuming. For this reason, Intel has always reserved its plants at their own processors, unlike other foundries as TSMC, which burn for many customers (Nvidia, AMD, ARM, etc..). But Intel appears to initiate a conversion: the company confirmed that it will burn in 22 nm for third party clients.

The motivation for this change of business model remains a mystery. Some analysts believe Intel would seek to increase the utilization of its plants to improve returns on huge investments that represent their construction. Our colleagues from SemiAccurate argue a very different explanation .

The first Intel customers (at least the only two that Intel was kind enough to reveal the identity) are FPGA designers, Achronix and Tabula. But Intel has already demonstrated a hybrid processor, the Atom E600C Stellarton , which brought together a core Atom and an FPGA on the same package. The use of FPGAs is part of Intel's strategy for the coming years, both for low-power Atom, but also for high performance Core. This strategy will unveil to light during the build output Haswell.