Sounds like 18A yield is so bad they are bringing in the 20A team to fix things...at the expense of using 20A in their own products. Guess we know which roulette square the company is putting it's money.
This is an obvious method for saving money, stop immediately any expenses for fixing 20A and concentrate all efforts to improving the yields of the 18A CMOS process, which is what Intel hopes to use to fabricate all its 2025/2026 server CPUs (Clearwater Forest and Diamond Rapids) and all its 2025/2026 laptop CPUs (Panther Lake).
The gap left by cancelling 20A can be filled more cheaply by outsourcing more to TSMC until the second half of 2025, when 18A should be ready for mass production.
Intel again noted that it had reached a sub-0.40 D0 defect density (def/cm^2) for 18A, a critical measurement of the yield rate for a process node. A process node is usually considered production-worthy and healthy once D0 reaches 0.5 or below.