Pat Gelsinger, Intel’s CEO, addressed rumours this week that the CPU giant was delaying products made using the company’s own Intel 3 and TSMC’s N3 (3nm-class) fabrication technologies. The CEO reiterated that all 3nm projects announced thus far would be released in 2024.
Intel has revealed three products that will be manufactured using 3nm class manufacturing technologies
Internally, the company plans to manufacture its datacenter-focused Granite Rapids and Sierra Forest processors on the Intel 3 node. This fabrication process is essentially a refined version of Intel 4, but with higher drive currents, lower via resistance, and denser high-performance libraries. All of these characteristics are especially advantageous for datacenter-class processors, though reduced via resistance should be beneficial for mobile CPUs as well.
Intel has only revealed two products that will be manufactured on its 3nm-class node internally.
Things get a little more complicated with external 3nm projects. According to a slide that Intel has shown several times, Intel is set to use TSMC’s N3 for a graphics tile of its client processors codenamed Meteor Lake and Arrow Lake due in 2023 and 2024.
According to a market research firm, Intel decided to postpone production of Meteor Lake’s graphics tile on TSMC’s N3 process in August 2022. Intel did not comment on any specific 3nm-based projects at the time, but did state that Meteor Lake would be available in 2023.
The company now claims that its Arrow Lake product, which consists of a compute tile produced on Intel’s 20A (2nm-class) node and a graphics tile produced on TSMC’s N3E, is on schedule for 2024. Given that TSMC will have gained extensive experience with its 3nm-class process technologies by the time Arrow Lake CPUs are released, it is unlikely that Intel will decide to delay Arrow Lake due to issues with TSMC’s N3/N3E.
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