Intel’s new CEO Pat Gelsinger wasted no time. Although he does not replace Bob Swan until February, he has already addressed the Intel workforce at a general meeting.
According The Oregonian, Intel told the assembled employees that it could wait to announce any changes to its manufacturing plans until Gelsinger was on board. This is an interesting aspect of the overall manufacturing situation and implies that Intel wants an engineering-experienced CEO to examine the situation and possibly make the decision. Then again, the Oregonian reports that Intel “can” postpone a decision, not that it would, so the issue may still be under discussion.
Intel has committed to deciding the future of its next-generation chip manufacturing plans before these CPUs need to be in production in 2023. This is the approximate date when we expect 7 nm CPUs to be on the market.
Intel is currently focused on Alder Lake and Rocket Lake. The first is Intel’s next hybrid platform that will offer up to 16 cores with up to eight full-size CPU cores and eight low-power cores. There are rumors that we can see Intel reaching some unusual thread counts here, supporting Hyper-Threading on the big cores, but not the small ones.
Rocket Lake is Intel’s next desktop platform that is still built at 14nm, but uses an updated microarchitecture based on last year’s Ice Lake mobile processors. Chipzilla indicated that Lake Rocket should offer an IPC improvement of up to 1.19x above Lake Comet.
Intel has not officially unveiled its 7 nm product line, but the rumor believes it is called Meteor Lake. At CES this week, Intel showed Alder Lake running on a laptop, implying that it will be an architecture that prioritizes mobile devices. Presumably, Alder Lake comes to desktops in 2022, which opens the way to Meteor Lake in 2023. If Intel is building this chip in its own factories, we can expect it to be launched at 7nm. If he uses TSMC or licenses a TSMC process in his own factories, he can choose 5nm or possibly 3nm depending on TSMC’s own technology ramp and the progress of the node.
Intel may postpone this decision for a month or two, but it takes time to implement the process node from another foundry or to design a chip specifically at TSMC. Whatever Intel is going to do, it has to start soon.
Intel vs. ‘A Lifestyle Company’
Intel is taking the threat of Apple’s M1 very seriously. Gelsinger is said to say to employees, “We have to deliver better products for the PC ecosystem than anything possible for a lifestyle company in Cupertino. We have to be that good in the future. “
It’s nice to see Intel taking the M1 seriously. Apple’s M1 chip hit the market like a bomb. While we are happy to recognize that there are still many questions about how Apple’s CPUs compare to x86 across the breadth and breadth of the software market, SoC is very good at what it does. To call Apple a “lifestyle company” in these circumstances is a straight shot. Alder Lake should be the appropriate point of comparison for any high-performance Mx CPU that Apple debuts, so let’s find out with that chip whether Intel’s bravado is justified or not.
It will be very interesting to see what kind of mobile power consumption benefits Intel can derive from Alder Lake’s hybrid computing architecture, and we hope that Intel will continue to improve x86 performance. Gelsinger’s attitude, however, is the right one. Both Intel and AMD must respond to the ARM invasion with everything they have, or risk the long-term prominence of x86 in the desktop and laptop market. AMD has its own Ryzen 5000 mobile chips coming this year, with the expected IPC elevation of 1.19x that we’ve seen on desktop chips. For now, Apple is the only company with a SoC that will realistically compete with x86 companies, but that could change in the future, depending on how the two manufacturers respond.
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