Intel is planning to release “Meteor Lake,” its first family of 7 nanometer Core desktop processors, in around two years’ time. The news was shared by CEO Pat Gelsinger during yesterday’s Intel Unleashed: Engineering the Future webcast, in which he clarified that blue team’s 7 nanometer process development was going well enough for Meteor Lake to be taped out later this year. Gelsinger also revealed that Intel will outsource some CPU production to the world’s most advanced semiconductor foundry, TSMC.
“[…] leveraging our 7 nanometer process, we are advancing the development of lead data center and client CPUs starting with Meteor Lake, our high-volume 2023 client product,” Gelsinger said. “In fact, we expect to tape in our 7 nanometer compute tile from Meteor Lake in the second quarter of this year. Meteor Lake features a breakthrough new x86 architecture and modular design utilizing multiple manufacturing processes across our XPU IPs as well as Intel’s advanced Foveros packaging technology.”
“[…] both Meteor Lake and Granite Rapids will have compute tiles built on Intel 7 nanometer, and the strength of our new IDM 2.0 model means we can strategically use the breadth of our ecosystem to our advantage. For our 2023 roadmap, we will also leverage our relationship with TSMC to deliver additional leadership CPU products for our client and data center customers.”
Meteor Lake will presumably comprise Intel’s 14th Gen Core desktop processor series. Preceding it is 13th Gen “Raptor Lake,” which is rumored to be a refreshed version of the upcoming 12th Gen “Alder Lake” family. Alder Lake CPUs will leverage high-performance cores and high-efficiency cores into a single product for greater power efficiency.