Intel said on Monday that the foundation of its next-generation processor, the Intel 4 process, is now “production ready today.”
That process will be used to produce Intel’s next chip, codenamed Meteor Lake.
Ann Kelleher, general manager of technology development at Intel, released an updated manufacturing roadmap in conjunction with the 2022 IEEE Electron Device Meeting, published on IEEE Spectrum. The roadmap itself looks similar, albeit with some roadmap tuning. The news, however, is that Intel is on the verge of launching what will likely be its 14th-generation Core chip, Meteor Lake.
intel has released its production roadmap for the next few years since last February. She started filling out the details in August and before, revealing the roadmap through the Lunar Lake of 2024. The key, however, is what Intel released on Monday, that Intel 4, and possibly Meteor Lake, is now ready for production.
Intel’s production roadmap as of December 2022, as published in the IEEE Spectrum.As Boyd Phelps, corporate vice president of Intel’s design engineering group and general manager of customer engineering, explained in August, only the Meteor Lake CPU tile will be based on Intel’s Intel 4 technology. The remainder of the tiles will come from TSMC, using tiles produced on its N5 and N6 processes. The various tiles will be built using the UCIe interfacea seemingly abstract concept that is remarkably accessible: like a PC, various tiles will be “connected” to the UCIe interconnect.
Probably the most significant improvement, however, will be the addition of specialized AI components. AI is a feature of Qualcomm Snapdragon Arm chips, its legacy of smartphone AI enhancements including portrait mode, with artificial bokeh inserted by AI.
At the Intel Innovation conference in September, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger spoke a little bit about what he thinks Meteor Lake’s AI capabilities could accomplish. “One of the things we will bring is what I would say is basic AI capabilities,” he said then. “I’m sitting on Zoom or Teams [call]. Do I want to have simultaneous translation or contextualization of that call? Yes. Do I want to have cameras that follow the speaker and perform image enhancements? Yup.”
In July, Meteor Lake details leakedalthough the leaks said the chip was scheduled for the second half of 2023. (The 13th generation Intel Core chips, Raptor Lake, were launched in September 2022.) Igor’s Lab says it has seen roadmaps showing chips with six performance cores and eight efficiency cores, with a new low-power E-core as well. It’s unclear what these low-power E-Cores are, though Intel has indicated that Meteor Lake will be a new design. Will everything happen faster than expected?
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