If we believe the latest industry rumors, the future generation Intel Meteor Lake, would feature a chip design with various dies or “tiles” each from different manufacturing processes. We’ve known for some time that Intel has made firm commitments to TSMC to outsource some of its production. But what is emerging with this generation seems to mean that Intel nevertheless wants to retain some control over operations.
Intel Meteor Lake: mixing technologies but keeping control
In concrete terms, it seems that sensitive elements such as the CPU and the logic cores will still be manufactured by Intel using its Intel 4 manufacturing process (in reality 7nm, which the blues say is technically comparable to TSMC’s 4nm). The Intel Xe graphics part of the future processor, which will offer up to 192 execution units (1536 cores), would be manufactured using TSMC’s 3nm process (N3), while the SoC where I/O and connectivity are managed could use a more mature manufacturing process such as TSMC’s 4nm (4N) or even 5nm.
Meteor Lake should allow Intel to go one step further with its hybrid architecture since it will probably offer the new high performance cores (P-Core) called Redwood Cove . These will be combined with Gracemont cores with low energy consumption. As mentioned earlier, the Meteor Lake chips are about to be finalized and tested at Intel. The graphics and connection chips will be produced by TSMC before the end of 2022. The final commercial version of Meteor Lake is expected to launch in 2023. For now, it is not known where the final “packaging” of future Meteor Lake will be done ( Intel or TSMC ).
