Hey, good morning, everyone. We're gonna get started with the second day here at the DB Technology Conference. We're very, very pleased to have Intel's CEO, Pat Gelsinger, joining me up on stage today. Before we get started, I'm going to read the safe harbor statement. You'll see the long version up there, if you have incredibly good eyes. So before we begin, please note that today's discussion may contain forward-looking statements that are subject to various risks and uncertainties and may reference non-GAAP financial measures. Please refer to Intel's most recent earnings release and annual report on Form 10-K and other filings with the SEC for more information on the risk factors that could cause actual results to differ materially and additional information on our non-GAAP financial measures, including reconciliations where appropriate, to the corresponding GAAP financial measures.
So with that fun stuff out of the way, I believe Pat's going to have a brief opening comment with a slide, and then we'll dive into Q&A. So Pat, thank you very much, and I'll hand it over to you.
Hey, thanks, Ross. Great to spend some time with you last night with dinner and some of the analysts, and, you know, thanks for the opportunity to provide, you know, our shareholders, potential shareholders, with an update and, you know, following our, you know, Q2 earnings, our August 1st earnings announcement. You know, it's been a difficult few weeks, and with that, we've been, you know, working hard to address the issues, and at earnings, we were determined to, you know, lay out a clear view, right, of where we were, but also some of the next steps that we needed to address for the next phase of our strategy, and obviously, the market didn't respond positively.
You know, we understand that, and we're taking seriously what the market's telling us, and, you know, hearing that, clearly, but we're also staying, you know, very focused on delivering and executing on the large number of the things that we laid out. We described a set of cost reductions. I can tell you today, most of those are well underway already. Like everybody in the industry, we realize we have to operate efficiently, with nimbleness, with urgency. You know, this is a competitive business and market, and that's part of the reason we took the actions, that we did as we build it, and as you think about the, turnaround story for Intel, I'd really like to say that we've now begun phase two.
You know, and phase one of the transformation was this rebuilding of the company and being able to get back to process and product leadership and laying out our IDM 2.0 strategy, and I think about that as the most significant rebuilding of the company since the memory to microprocessor, you know, transition, and this idea that we had to get back to process leadership. You know, we described that as our five nodes and four-year, you know, journey, you know, and we see the finish line in sight, and since we released the fifth of those, right, the PDK for Intel 18A, you know, we've seen a market uptick in activities in the industry. We now have about a dozen customers that are actively engaged with us, you know, around that PDK.
We have eight product tape-ins that we expect to finish by the middle of next year, and of course, Panther Lake and Clearwater Forest, our first client and server, you know, product. And I'm happy to, you know, update the audience that we're now... You know, for this as a production process, we're now below zero point four D0 as defect density, as we touched on last night, Ross. You know, this is now a healthy process that we're looking forward, and we'll start production wafers with Panther Lake before the end of the year. So we're on track to deliver that. We're seeing an uptick in activity, you know, from the industry since the PDK 1.0 went out.
And, you know, as we've also talked about in our foundry strategy, our advanced packaging remains a huge differentiator. And, since the beginning of the year, we have about a tripling of our deal pipeline in advanced packaging, so that continues to be the on-ramp for many of our foundry customers. In addition to that, of course, is rebuilding the product execution, so process, products, and we're seeing now that we have competitive products. You know, we've gone from many steppings to get to production. We're now delivering on A and B step consistently, and next week, we'll be launching Lunar Lake, you know, the most compelling PC, AI PC product ever. And, with that, we'll dispel some of the myths around the battery life of x86 versus ARM in a very declarative way.
You know, it simply is a great product. So phase one was process, product. Phase two has to move into now becoming efficient, implementing cost actions. And I realized when I took the job that, you know, we needed to take these actions. However, you couldn't go to the TD and product teams and say, "I need you to fundamentally reduce cost and get back to leadership simultaneously." And we chose, get back to leadership first, and now we're focused on get efficient. And the clean sheet exercise that, Dave and I, you know, began at the beginning of the year as we rolled out the new operating model, you know, as a result of the Q2 earnings, you know, we just accelerated what we already had underway, and it's truly a clean sheet effort, best-in-class fab and foundry, best-in-class, fabless, companies.
You know, and on the capital side, obviously, having completed five nodes in four years, getting shell-ahead, now it's getting efficiency of those capital investments and, you know, being able to start judging capital investments based on true market signals. You know, where we are in our products, obviously, lower in revenue at the beginning of the year, so we're able to make some reductions, but also, with that shell-ahead, we're able to now respond to market signals from external foundry customers as well. And on the headcount and operation side, you know, 15,000. You know, these are friends, these are people that I've worked with for many years, and it's, you know, challenging to see 30- and 40-year veterans of the company, but they view it as the right thing in this phase.
We're well underway, site reduction, portfolio reductions, to build an efficient, competitive Intel. You know, and we respect some of the skepticism, you know, that we've received from the market. You know, I, my leadership team, the company, we believe we're up for the challenge. We're committed to do it. And as we go from memory to microprocessors to IDM 2.0, fab and fabless, you know, businesses, we're well underway to deliver what we said we would. So with that, Ross, let's go to whatever questions you might have.
Perfect. Thank you very much for that. So what I really want to try to do is talk a little bit about the near term and connect that to the IDM 2.0 transformation.
Mm-hmm.
So I think what investors are truly concerned about is, you know, the market will go up and down in the near term, and that's fine, but in Intel's case, in the middle of a transformation, the concern is that it's a reflection on something more existential at the company. So I want to be able to kind of bridge the gap between those two. So why don't we just start off, in the near term, you know, for the first half of this year, roughly, you expected super seasonality in the back half of the year and now it's sub-seasonality. What changed, and how much of that is a market-wide change versus Intel specific?
Yeah. And, you know, as we, you know, came through and started to look at the second half of the year, you know, what we saw was markets were a little bit weaker. Some of our cyclical businesses, auto has been reported, you know, FPGA, some of those other businesses didn't come back as quickly as we thought they would. You know, but we also saw in the PC industry, and some indicated it was share loss, we believe that wasn't the case at all. You know, it was simply sell-through wasn't as strong as we thought on the PC, and I think some of the more recent signals says, "Yeah, we probably got it right," you know, as we saw a little bit of inventory build with OEMs and channels.
You know, we took our Q3 guidance to address that inventory a bit more aggressively. We believe that, you know, our PC position remains strong for that. You know, servers, you know, we're still in the environment where the AI build has, you know, continued to depress the overall server market. Now, we are seeing some more green shoots associated with head nodes, with, you know, some refresh cycles that are getting more, you know, compelling, but that portion of the business hasn't been as robust as we would expect. Then we also have some unique issues with, like China, in the geopolitical sense, which has also been, you know, a bit less aggressive in its recovery than we would have expected at the beginning of the year.
You know, all of that taken together, though, you know, we don't see. There's not any, like, surprises inside of that. Very understandable, and I think in some cases, you know, like the inventory positions in the industry, we were the first ones to really understand what was going on, given our large market share and our focus on sell out, not just sell into the channel.
Yeah. So on the revenue side, it sounds like it was more of a market dynamic and nothing specific to Intel and share loss or anything like that.
Yeah, and you know, I mean, we've been, you know, expecting to see a stronger, server cycle on this and now, you know, I view it some ways as now that I have competitive products again, we're ready to go, but the energy's in the AI server area. So that area has been a bit disappointing that we haven't seen more uptick there, but again, with good products, you know, we're now starting to compete much more effectively.
The second part of the near term to then longer term, connecting the dots, I want to do is on the gross margin side.
Yeah.
That seemed to be, you know, admittedly, with lower revenues, of course, you're gonna have lower gross margins, but it, it was a bit worse than that.
Mm-hmm.
This seems like it's a bit more Intel specific. Talk a little bit about why the gross margin, whether it's second quarter or second half, you know, unfortunately, has a three handle again?
Yeah. Yeah, very unacceptable, I'd say. You know, pieces of that, obviously, we talked about Meteor Lake, the new fabs in Ireland. You know, it really was, you know, I'll say, we sort of had this confluence of moving out of a TD fab, which is higher cost, into a manufacturing fab, which will be lower cost once it comes down the learning curve, right? We're like, "Oh, man," right? You know, this is the right thing to accelerate Meteor Lake, and we're still aiming for 40 million units this year, which looks good, so good momentum there. Early life of a big fab, you still have a lot of those depreciation costs at the low volume on the front end. That was surprising.
And then the fab well overachieved, right? Its total wafer outputs. So, you know, we have, you know, more of those high-cost wafers sitting on the front end, which, again, is good news, right? It's gonna move down the learning curve more rapidly and the cost curve, but it did remarkably depress the margins, you know. And, you know, as we're separating the company into foundry and fabless, you know, some of the systems issues, right? Weren't, you know, properly reflecting that in our forecast, so that was also a disappointment. But that was only a piece of the margin story. We also had some areas that, you know, where we, you know, had, you know, one-time effects in businesses that we were exiting, right? Which impacted the margin plans that we had-...
One-time write-offs, et cetera, which were also, you know, effects that, you know, further weakened the margin structure, and then some other areas of new products, et cetera, that also contributed to it, but overall, unacceptable in margins, and internally, we're putting just a lot of focus that, you know, hey, we need to get back into the fours very quickly and then back into the fives, and obviously, some of our product lines need to be in the sixes.
So the last near-term question I'll have is kind of bringing those two things together. So part of the gross margin pain is too much goodness on the AI PC side, Meteor Lake, and then Lunar Lake is going to ramp. How is it big enough to be bad for gross margin, but not big enough to be good for revenues?
Yeah.
How do people reconcile those two?
Yeah, and there is a piece of that that you know, as we look across the full stack of AI PCs, as they you know come into the marketplace, you know, we you know across the full range of our product line, you know, we've actually seen pretty good ASPs on those high-end AI PCs, but across the mix, it hasn't yet been enough to really pull up the overall picture. And we did see some of the lower price points have pretty good strength, but obviously, we're here to maintain our market share. So when you blend all of that together, clearly wasn't as strong on the overall revenue picture as we would expect to become the case over time.
Obviously, as we're now launching Lunar Lake, we have a very powerful product, you know, coming in there, good ASPs associated with that, and that is the revenue story that we've indicated, that we do expect to see nice revenue expansion over time. Clearly, you know, with the strong launch next week, the expectations of the rest of the year that we have as we start to ramp that and the continued Meteor Lake ramp, here we do feel better about both ASPs and revenue growth as we go through Q4 and into next year.
So let's switch gears over to the restructuring side. What is the overall goal from an efficiency level, a profit margin, you know, return metrics? What led to that being 15,000 and $10 billion, as opposed to, you know, $5 billion more or $5 billion less?
Yeah.
How is Intel thinking about it, and even potentially splitting between the CapEx side and the OpEx side?
Yeah. And, you know, what we did was, you know, we had a consultant on each side, basically take a clean sheet view of best-in-class foundry, best-in-class fabless, right? And, you know, we used that as a mirror back to all of our existing businesses to say, "Okay, right, are you gonna get to top quartile on, you know, each of these functions? Are you gonna get to, right, best-in-class R&D efficiency on front-end design and back-end design? Are we gonna get to being, you know, world-class in fabless metrics versus TSMC and best in class in terms of equipment utilization, cost of chemicals, right? Labor costs, you know, labor hours per wafer," you know, just every metric, and that's what led to the goals that we laid out.
Now, the fifteen thousand, you know, as we view, and some have said, "Is that enough, Pat, is that not enough?" You know, we are committed to get through it quickly, but we also realize that we have portfolio actions that are beyond that, and some of those will continue longer because, you know, adjusting portfolios have a bit longer cycle associated with it. As I said, you know, we're already, you know, the majority of those fifteen thousand actions are already identified, so we feel, you know, good that we'll get those finished. You know, we'll complete some of the near-term portfolio actions and then get to the point that we can rebuild the energy, the momentum, and the execution of the vision of the company.
You know, and some of the examples inside of this would be, you know, we've accumulated sites over our almost sixty-year history, right? You know, and just sort of, you know, you just pick these up. Okay, we're gonna clean up all the sites. As we get to the other side of five nodes and four years, our CapEx efficiency becomes a top priority. And, you know, as we've talked about, a year ago, Ross, you know, churning through Intel 7, Intel 4, Intel 3, Intel 20A, Intel 18A, you're not capital efficient when you're going through such a rapid catch-up period. As we see the end of that, get focused on capital efficiency. We had no shell-ahead capacity.
Okay, we now have shell-ahead capacity, so I can scale up with the more expensive equipment portion of it as we see clear product demand and foundry customer demand. So the reductions that we've taken in our CapEx budget, they are clearly aligned to a smaller Intel products revenue, but also to a greater efficiency target that we believe, hey, we got to be best in class, compared to it. And all of those efforts taken together, we feel like we're taking the actions necessary with haste to get the company where it needs to be. And I'd also say, you know, in some of these areas, you know, these aren't issues of the last year or two. In a number of cases, these are decades issues. You know, we've been an IDM 1.0.
We've had business processes, as we've talked about before, you know, we're setting up two ERP systems for the company. You know, a company that needs to be entirely manically focused on customer success and operational, right, on the fabless side, and a company that needs to be innovative, efficient, and capital light on the fabless side. Creating, you know, changes to the Intel culture that are very deep and longstanding, and again, we're well underway with the clean sheet effort to get those completed rapidly as we move into the second phase of the transformation.
So it's a good segue to the manufacturing side. You talked a little bit, you know, and last night, we talked about some of the defect density, bunch of kind of nerdy stats in a good way-
Yeah, good stuff.
for folks. When can investors expect to have positive proof that 18A is, in fact, on time, delivering what you expected, you know, at leadership or ahead of your competition, if you include backside power and all those sorts of things? When is that going to be? When's the show-me story gonna be shown?
You know, clearly, you know, for us in our product portfolio, you know, it's Panther Lake and Clearwater Forest, right? You know, it's the two products that we'll be delivering. You know, the less than 0.4 defect density that I cited earlier, you know, that's a good yield at this point. You know, and Ross, of course, I always have show and tell. You know, here's a Clearwater Forest, 288-core 18A product. It's a 18A top die with an Intel 3 base die, which is now a mature process as well, right? In the labs, running. We'll get samples to customers late this year. You know, so you're gonna start to hear some of the chatter, you know, coming from customers as they see it.
We, of course, not to be outdone, reach to my other pocket. You know, here's a Panther Lake, you know, powered on, looking healthy, 18A, bringing wafers back from TSMC, you know, and we'll again be sampling, beginning the sampling process to customers late this year. So our first two products are Clearwater Forest, and when I go talk to potential foundry customers, you know, I walk into the room saying, "Hey, we're running this at volume." Right? You know, your products wouldn't ramp until late 2025, 2026, 2027. I am ramping my production wafer starts, beginning on products like Panther Lake, by the end of this year. Right? You know, we're well ahead of it. We're de-risking it for you.
As I also said in my initial comments, you know, we now have a dozen active external designs that are under discussion, and we expect more market confirmation coming, you know, from that. You know, as we said before, those customers, hey, they have big relationships with their current foundry providers, so they're reluctant to be public. But again, I expect that market chatter will start to reaffirm, you know, some of that as we go forward. And as I said, we now have eight designs, some of them ourselves, some others that we'll be taking in in the first half of next year. So I believe that we're now with the PDK 1.0, you're starting to hear EDA, you know, vendor Synopsys, Cadence reaffirming it. We're seeing...
You know, and by the way, those defect numbers that I gave you, you know, that's transistor and backside power, right? You know, which is something that only Intel provides in the industry, so it's a composite defect density ratio. So, you know, we do feel like we're now finishing that five nodes, four-year journey, right? And again, Intel 7, Intel 4, Intel 3, 20A, 18A, right, in four years. Hmm, yep. Hey, this is a remarkable achievement as we bring it across the line and super proud as we do it, but now we've got to go to the next phase, scale it in our products in the industry and more efficiently.
So that's a perfect segue to the foundry side of the equation. If you're proving with these products internally that 18A is working the foundry side, that should be a great carrot for your potential customers there. Talk about the pace of progress on the foundry side and going from where you are today to, you know, somewhere in the low- to mid-single-digit billions of dollars and then eventually $15 billion, I think you have, of lifetime value.
Yep.
Talk about how long it's taken to get to where you want to go, and when will you be hitting those bigger numbers?
Yeah. And let's, let's start on the negative side. You know, the two things that have surprised me in the foundry journey, one is that the hideous memories of COVID supply chains have diminished, right? And, you know, I was on the phone with Secretary Raimondo, Department of Commerce, right? And she was lamenting that people aren't more concerned about the resilience of their supply chains, right? And I said, "Me too!" Right? You know, and it's like, you know, three years ago, oh, my gosh, right? You know, now it's like, oh, you know, we're okay with our Asian supply chain. So that's been surprising that hasn't remained higher priority, right, for, customers. I'll just say disappointing. The second piece that's been disappointing is, just the...
We underestimated, I underestimated the amount of heavy lifting beyond producing good wafers. The EDA, the IP ecosystem that needs to get enabled to bring designs onto the foundry. So those have been the two areas that, you know, in this current environment, have been a bit harder than I would have expected. Now, on the other side, you know, the thing that's been a piece of super good news is the advanced packaging, right? Where, you know, that's been the fast ramp into the foundry. As I said, we've seen a tripling in the amount of, you know, active deals that we have on the table this year for. You know, we're at full capacity and ramping more capacity. Obviously, that's less CapEx intensive for our New Mexico facility.
So, you know, that is ramping quickly. Our technologies are highly differentiated. Technologies like EMIB are much more effective than, technologies like CoWoS, you know, in terms of cost, scale, et cetera. So very differentiated technologies. You know, a deal pipeline that's tripled over the year. We've converted many of those designs, and many of those customers are the active wafer customers that we now have underway. And the PDK 1.0 that we released in July, it was really the flip, right? And now the activity has, you know, expanded quite significantly since then. Numerous designs, about a dozen potential customers in active discussions today. You know, some of those with formal RFQs, some of those are earlier in the design pipeline.
You know, the EDA partners are now aggressively engaging with their design customers, and they look at this, "Oh, you know, hey, that customer was only using me for TSMC. Hmm, new revenue opportunity." So there's a lot of motivation on the EDA and the IP customers', you know, part. So we've really seen that energy, you know, pick up quite a lot since July. Now we have to bring those deals across the line. You know, we have reserved a modest amount of our capacity, you know, for those customers. But with our shell-ahead strategy, we're well positioned to expand as we see the designs materialize, and I am optimistic that we'll, you know, be delivering on the targets that we set.
So, Pat, that was gonna be my final question on that. So between the positives and negatives that you just mentioned, does that change anything about the break-even in, I think, 2027, midpoint of the 2025-2030 range, I think, is what you said earlier this year?
Yeah, no change. You know, we still believe that we can achieve those. Obviously, we're driving our teams quite aggressively to accomplish that. The $15 billion of long-term deal value that we have today, you know, gives us clear confidence of the $15 billion revenue, you know, by the end of the decade. You know, the deal pipeline that we've seen expand on advanced packaging and now on wafers, I think there's plenty of business for us, you know, to go win to meet those objectives.
So let's switch gears to the AI side of things, and this might be the longest I've ever gone without talking about AI up on stage here. The PC side, we'll get to, but I think the bigger question is: What is Intel's plan on the infrastructure side? Whether it be on the CPU side, where I think the plan is a little clearer, or on the accelerator side. So just talk a little bit about how you play in that-
Yeah.
... especially given, you know, some of the GPU-centric folks that are doing, you know, billions and billions and billions of revenue.
Mm-hmm. And, you know, if we start on the CPU side, you know, clearly, the evolution of AI, and I sort of view it as the high-end training and the at-scale cloud inferencing versus the enterprise and edge deployment, and if we separate those, you know, two worlds, clearly, as businesses are now saying: "How do I go monetize, you know, AI into my business value?" They're more on this side of the page, you know. And, you know, today, 70% of computing is done in the cloud. 80+% of data remains on-prem or in control of the enterprise.
Hmm.
That's a pretty stark contrast when you think about it. So the mission-critical business data's over here, and all of the enthusiasm on AI is over here. And I will argue that that data, in the last twenty-five years of cloud, hasn't moved to the cloud, and I don't think it's gonna move to the cloud. And in fact, it's much more about how do you bring AI workloads to the data, to those mission-critical use cases in the business? And obviously, that's an area that our strengths are much more substantial, where the role of the CPU... You know, and even as you go think about some of the evolutions that we're seeing in the architecture of, AI systems, you know, Grace Hopper is what? A CPU and a GPU, because this is where the data is, this is where the applications are, et cetera.
So our position in the CPU, and we're starting to see businesses ask us: "Where's my TCO from AI?" You know, "How do I get an ROI from AI?" And it's on this side of the page where our strengths become stronger, our Xeons are stronger, and our system platform of CPU plus GPU are stronger. So I'd say, at that level, do we see ourself competing over here? Not nearly as much, right? And, you know, I mean, that race, you know, they are so far ahead in some of the other challenges that we have. We're just not gonna be competing anytime soon for high-end training. And, you know, as I view it, you know, in the four-horse race on this side of the page, you know, NVIDIA, build your own, Trainium, Inferentia, TPU, you know, AMD, and Intel is number four. That's hard.
But on this side of the page, we have a lot of strengths, and we are starting to see we have very high market share on head nodes, you know, very high market share of people using AI workloads on our Xeons, and that's one of those areas that we are seeing a bit of green shoots. Today, you know, an enterprise-focused cloud vendor, IBM, you know, announced their use of Gaudi, right? It was announced earlier today as part of their cloud offerings. Remember, you know, they're not your typical at-scale cloud, they're an enterprise cloud, you know, player. So, you know, I think that resonates, you know, with the framing of the market as I described it. Now, you know, we, we. As we've refurbished the CPU product line with Xeons, Granite Rapids, Sierra Forest is much more competitive.
You know, I just showed off my Clearwater Forest here, you know, the next generation on 18A. So the products are getting better. We're seeing life in that area, and that's, you know, where I think the battle that we, you know, have the armament, building on our x86 franchise to go be competitive.
In the last five minutes, given that this audience tends to care about financials, let's talk about some of the financial implications and targets that you have. A year ago, we sat up on stage, and you roughly talked about $100 billion in revenue and a 60/40 gross margin, operating margin, 85 out of the 100 be from products, and 15 would be from foundry. Given what you're seeing on the revenue front, given what you've done on the restructuring front, how does that change?
Yeah. And you know, we still see the basic metrics that we've you know, our goal, Dave and my goal of 60/40 this decade, we're off to go do that. Break even on foundry you know, 2027, we're off to go do that. Obviously, from a lower revenue base, though, you know, we don't see that we're you know, gonna achieve those revenues, and we're doing all of our planning you know, and I'll call it the investment plan, assuming a lower growth rate on the products revenue, making sure that we've you know, built a financial plan that you know, gives our shareholders greater confidence. You know, these guys are gonna hit it. They have an investment plan that's lower on OpEx, lower on CapEx, and they'll increment up when we see true market demand associated with it.
So get our cost structures, get our margin structures, get our profitability consistent with those metrics, assuming a more conservative view of the products revenue so that we don't disappoint our shareholders, again, and that's our objective. So that's part of this clean sheet effort, right? Is to assume a much more modest growth rate, build the investment plans, and only increment on top of those. So that's how the CapEx plan is being set, right, to a lower number. Given that we've now built the shell-ahead capacity, we can increment upward. We've also, you know, as part of those efforts, leaning much harder into our supply chain and equipment providers. You know, that's how you run great factories. How do you create long-term capital returns? We can't be peaking processes. We have to create more continuity.
You know, the equipment set from Intel 3 to 18A to 14A to 10A, how do we create factories that are much more flexible, you know, between those nodes? You know, it's not gonna be a factory that you ramp and then scale down. You know, moves, changes, adds, you know, need to become much more effective, and all of those things are the baseline of this, clean sheet effort that we have, underway, and we feel good that we can accomplish those broad metrics, even with a, lower revenue base. As you said, we're taking actions to, you know, continue to refine the portfolio. You know, some of those things we'll, you know, see, rolling out as we go through the year. For that, you know, since I've been at the company, I've, exited eleven businesses. Since I've been here, as we've been taking steps in terms of spinning out Mobileye, Altera, IMS, the NAND business, and we have others that will allow us to become a simpler, you know, more efficient, focused foundry and a fabless company.
Why don't we wrap up with talking about gross margin? It's always been a very key metric for Intel and for semiconductor-
Yep.
- investors in general. Walk us through what the key milestones are to go from, you know, roughly 40% to your 60% target?
Yep, and, you know, this is a challenging period for that. And, you know, my decision on Lunar Lake, as an example, this is unquestionably the right thing for us to lead the AI PC. I declared the AI PC generation. Everything since then has been the right, you know, thing to go do it. We've seen the Qualcomm and other, you know, vectors there. So, you know, we took the challenging decision, you know, take the Lunar Lake volumes up dramatically, even though it was a high-end part that we're bringing into more mainstream price points. That depresses margins. So the best thing that we're gonna be able to do to improve margins is move to the next generation products, bring those wafers home. You know, and that's exactly what Panther Lake is, as we bring more of those wafers home.
But that doesn't affect next year's margins very much, right? Since the ramp only starts late next year and really affects 2026. So, you know, 2024 and 2025, you know, are, you know, I'll say it's much more of a ground game, right? You know, every penny, every nickel, every test time, every, you know, element, just grind out the improvements. And as we get to the 18A product generation that ramps significantly in 2026, okay, happy days. Bring new wafers home. The cost structure, as we, you know, we've done detailed analysis of 18A cost structure versus competitive nodes. We feel very good about, you know, the number of mask layers, the number of EUV layers, the, you know, days per mask layer, defects, and, and so on.
So we feel like as we get through 2024, 2025, the margin picture has structural improvement, and in the near term, it really is about building more and more cost effectiveness into the business, you know, in every aspect, how we price the products, you know, how we deliver them through the channel, you know, market segments where we have more pricing power versus more competitive challenges. So all of those together, you know, we're quite committed to seeing that pathway, near-term ground game, long-term structural improvements to get us where we need to on margins. You know, and finally, on this point, you know, I'd also emphasize, you know, that you know, as we get to a more normal cadence on our process technologies, you know, all of the elements start working for us.
You're able to run the nodes longer, you get better capital efficiency, you know, and this move to get back to a modern EUV process technology, right, with multiple nodes running across that factory with much more flexibility, you know, those all things are set up beautifully for Intel. And as we bring those wafers home, which represent a large portion of those wafers, right, that we're gonna be able to bring home, all of that margin drops through to Intel uniquely in the industry. That's the plan that we've laid out as we go through the decade.
Great! Well, I could go on for another half hour, but unfortunately, I'm not allowed to, so we're out of time. Pat, thank you so much for coming-
Thank you, Ross.
again this year.
Thank you, all.
We appreciate it, and thank you to the great audience as well.
Very good.