Intel Fixes 7nm and Announces New Meteor Lake CPU for 2023

Intel’s new CEO Pat Gelsinger made a slew of new announcements at today’s Intel Unleashed: Engineering the Future event.

First off, he revealed that the company had finally fixed the primary issues that were delaying its 7nm line-up of products. As a result, Gelsinger said that Intel will tape in its first 7nm CPU for desktop PCs in Q2 2021. The new chip titled Meteor Lake will begin shipping to markets in 2023 along with Intel’s Granite Rapids data center CPUs.

Meteor Lake will be a next-gen follow-up to Intel’s recently announced Alder Lake Chip launching later this year. So, it’s very much possible that it will also have a mixed core design with both 7nm Ocean Cove and 10nm Gracemont packed in together. This will also be the company’s first product to employ the Foveros packaging technology to stack tiles on top of each other.

The 3D-stacked design could allow Intel to either use its own 7nm cores or swap in cores based on a process node sourced from a third-party foundry, like TSMC or Samsung.

Speaking of TSMC, Intel plans to outsource the production of the CPU cores to them for some of the CPU models that are arriving in 2023. This is because Intel, while having addressed the issues with its 7nm process, said that the majority of its products in 2023 will be produced in house, but the delayed 7nm production schedule will put the company in direct competition with chips built on more advanced nodes from competing foundries.

In this vein, Gelsinger also announced that the company will be creating a standalone foundry model called “Intel Foundry Services” to combat 80% of global chip creation coming out of Asia and to fill the semiconductor gap that the world is currently suffering through.

Meteor Lake hitting the tape in phase in July this year indicates how far down the road Intel is with its first 7nm client processor. This phase is where the different parts of the final chip are brought together for the first time in one package ahead of a final ‘tape out’ design just before manufacturing. So, Intel should be able to stick to their 2023 plan provided Covid-19 or the global semiconductor shortage have nothing to say about it.

Next in line for Intel is Grand Rapids, the company’s first 7nm server CPU, that will arrive in 2023 just in time to compete with AMD’s new Genoa processors.

About Intel

Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, in Silicon Valley. It is the world’s largest semiconductor chip manufacturer on the basis of revenue, and is the developer of the x86 series of microprocessors – the processors found in most personal computers (PCs).

Incorporated in Delaware, Intel ranked No. 46 in the 2018 Fortune 500 list of the largest United States corporations by total revenue.