Pat Gelsinger Confirms Lunar Lake Will Use TSMC’s N3B Process Node
Following the latest IFS Direct 2024 event, Pat Gelsinger confirmed that Intel’s upcoming processors will resort to TSMC’s cutting-edge process nodes. This is not new information, however, it is the first time we’re hearing it from Intel’s own mouth.
Intel Lunar Lake to Use TSMC’s N3B Process
A small press session was held after the IFS Direct event, where CEO of Intel, Pat Gelsinger confirmed Intel’s partnership with TSMC to produce Lunar Lake. For the unaware, Lunar Lake is the successor to Meteor Lake and targets the ever-growing 15W laptop segment.
Gelsinger also confirmed the expansion of orders to TSMC, confirming that TSMC will hold orders for Intel’s Arrow and Lunar Lake CPU, GPU, and NPU chips this year, and will produce them using the N3B process, officially ushering in the Intel notebook platform that the outside world has been waiting for for many years. CPU orders.
Pat Gelsinger (Translated)
If we take Pat’s (translated) wording literally, it would imply that the entire Lunar Lake package is built on TSMC’s N3B node. However, Intel’s own slides indicate that Lunar Lake will be a mix of external nodes plus the bleeding-edge 18A node.
The modular design (Foveros) enables them to tackle this obstacle by contracting TSMC with almost all of Lunar Lake. Investors and consumers want reliable products out as fast as possible. If they wait a quarter or two should they choose to design everything using IFS, they’ll have to play catch up once more.
It will be quite interesting to see 18A in action since Lunar Lake is said to arrive by late 2024. As 18A is a 1.8nm equivalent process, odds would be in Intel’s favor as they’d have the most advanced node, if Lunar Lake releases on time.
Lunar Lake: Everything We Know So Far
Lunar Lake succeeds Meteor Lake by offering a substantial architectural uplifts. On the CPU side of things, we have up to 8 Lion Cove and Skymont cores, with no support for hyperthreading. The iGPU has been upgraded from Xe-LPG to Xe2-LPG (8 Xe Cores), also known as Battlemage.
Memory-wise, support for LPDDR5x-8533 memory is rumored. The ‘MX‘ in Lunar Lake-MX indicates packaged memory, that is, the RAM will be directly soldered on to the CPU package, with capacities starting from 16GB.
- Up to 4 Lion-Cove P Cores and 4 Skymont E Cores with no SMT
- 8 Xe2 (Battlemage) iGPU Cores
- Support for On Package LPDDR5x-8533 Memory
- CPU+GFX Tile Built Using TSMC’s N3B Node
- SoC Tile Built Using Intel 18A
- Next-Gen NPU 4.0
- Support for WiFi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4
- 40% Efficiency Uplift Touted
- 2.5 TFLOPS (12W) | 3.8 TFLOPS (Peak Performance)
Lunar Lake’s design is significantly different from Meteor Lake, in a sense that it only features 2 Tiles; CPU+GFX, SoC. This CPU+GFX Tile will verly likely manufactured be using TSMC N3B, as indicated by documentation. Put two and two together, the SoC tile is then left to be fabricated using Intel 18A. Read more about Lunar Lake here.
Source: ChinaTimes
