Intel’s upcoming Core Ultra 200 processors have officially entered mass production…at TSMC’s 3nm fabs. As revealed at Computex earlier this month, the Lunar Lake CPU dies will be fabbed on TSMC’s N3B node, a first for Team Blue. Previously with Meteor Lake, the iGPU, SoC, and I/O dies were outsourced to a mature TSMC node while the compute die was manufactured using the Intel 4 process. With Lunar Lake (and likely Arrow Lake), all the tiles/chiplets will be fabricated by TSMC, only leaving the packaging to Intel Foundry.
Like the Intel 4 process, TSMC’s N3B node leverages EUV lithography and FinFET transistors, offering roughly the same transistor density and perhaps, performance. Lunar Lake laptops are scheduled to launch in the last quarter of the year, featuring Intel’s latest CPU and GPU architectures, and a 50-ish TOP NPU.
Unlike Intel’s previous hybrid core architectures, Lunar Lake consists of 4x P-cores and 4x E-cores. The former will leverage Lion Cove, while the latter will be based on the Skymont core architecture. This will be the chipmaker’s first mainstream processor lacking hyper-threading. Here’s why.
Lunar Lake will also be the first SKU to showcase the Xe2 “Battlemage” graphics architecture which features a wider SIMD, deeper caches, upgraded RT and matrix cores, and a massively upgraded display engine.
The Core Ultra 200V processors will sport Intel’s most power-efficient design, beating AMD’s Zen 4-based Phoenix and the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 with a 30% and 20% lower package power (and efficiency?).
It’s unclear whether all the Arrow Lake dies will be fabbed by TSMC as well, but that’s what rumors have previously claimed. Word is that only the lower-end Core i5/Core Ultra 5 desktop CPUs will be fabbed on Intel’s 20A node, while the Core Ultra 7/9 and the entire mobility lineup will be fabbed on the TSMC N3B process.
Source: Digitimes.
