Meteor Lake: TSMC builds more chips than Intel for next-gen CPUs

Most of the individual chips in the Meteor Lake package come from TSMC, as Intel revealed at the Hot Chips 34 trade show. However, TSMC’s often late-suspicioned N3 production is not used, for so a delay is not possible, at least for this reason. According to Intel, Meteor Lake is on time.

Intel Compute and Base Die

The manufacturer had already revealed that Intel will use the new production stage “Intel 4” with use of EUV for the first time for Meteor Lake processor cores. It was expected that the base mosaic, that is, the bottom plate, so to speak, would come from our own company, but now it has also been confirmed. But what was missing was all the other elements: graphics, SoC element and the I/O chip. They all come from TSMC, and each in its own manufacturing process. Ultimately, it all comes together with the latest generation of Foveros, Intel’s technology for assembling individual chips in terms of level and height.

Two TSMC Processes on Intel Base Tile

The “motherboard” is based on Intel’s old 22nm process, 22FFL, which the group now markets as “Intel 16,” based on the new node names. The use of “Intel 16” saves costs because this technology has been proven for a long time, has high performance and is therefore relatively inexpensive to manufacture. The individual dies sit on top of this, three of them come from TSMC: the GPU tile is made on TSMC’s N5 process, the SoC chip with the largest area uses TSMC’s N6 process, a well-known offshoot of the tiers of TSMC’s 7nm technology. , which AMD currently uses for the Ryzen 6000, for example, and the I/O chip also uses this N6 process.

Meteor Lake is the big step up in Intel’s tile hierarchy, spanning from desktops to laptops. On the server, Intel is already testing it with Sapphire Rapids, which is long overdue, and Ponte Vecchio, the right accelerator.

eICU maybe from 2025 with Lunar Lake

In the future, Intel wants to accompany you Universal Chiplet Interconnection Express (UCIe) establish an open standard that can also be used by other manufacturers. In keeping with Intel’s long-term goal, this should allow foundry customers to more easily plug a wide variety of small chips into a single package. But this technology will only be used after Arrow Lake, the successor to Meteor Lake, so probably 2025 with Lunar Lake at the earliest. According to Intel, Meteor Lake is scheduled for next year.