Intel IDM 2.0 approach has made the chipmaker’s internal foundry more open to third-party customers. It also means the IC design team will rely more on external foundries to meet deadlines. The 14th Gen Meteor Lake family will be the first to demonstrate this. While the CPU compute die is fabbed on the Intel 4/4nm process, the iGPU and SoC tiles are fabbed on TSMC’s 4nm and 6nm nodes, respectively.
A report from Goldman Sachs believes that Intel’s foundry orders to TSMC will increase dramatically between 2024 and 2025. The latter’s foundry services to the former may increase to $5.6 billion and $9.7 billion in 2024 and 2025, respectively. The shift to a chiplet or tiled design will play a big role in this shift. Starting from the 14th Gen Meteor Lake lineup, every chip Intel sells will include a leading-edge TSMC chiplet powering the iGPU. This will continue with 15th Gen Arrow Lake in late 2024 and 16th Gen Lunar Lake in 2025.
Intel’s dedicated graphics division is also wholly reliant on TSMC. The 1st Gen Arc Alchemist GPUs leverage the TSMC N6 node across all SKUs and platforms. The 2nd Gen Battlemage and 3rd Gen Celestial lineups are said to be based on the 4nm and 3nm nodes, respectively. And unlike Alchemist, these GPUs will be produced on much larger scales, serving the budget and enthusiast markets. Enough to rival or even overtake AMD in the PC market.
Source: ChinaTimes.
