Starting in 2024, Intel CPUs for PCs will combine the company’s processor technology with silicon from other manufacturers on a single chip.
Intel plans on debuting the new architecture with the Arrow Lake family, which will rely on the company’s 5-nanometer or Intel 20A manufacturing technologies. “Arrow Lake will be the first Intel product using Intel 20A tiles, as well as tiles made using an external process,” the chipmaker said during a Thursday investors event.
Intel previewed Arrow Lake a year after the company announced it would begin leveraging chip manufacturing giant TSMC to build some of its processors. At the time, the plan was to tap TSMC to “deliver additional leadership CPU products” for both PCs and data centers for 2023.
Intel didn’t say which external manufacturers it’ll use to help build Arrow Lake chips. But a presentation slide used the words “External N3,” which suggests Intel will use the 3nm manufacturing process from TSMC, which produces chips for Apple and AMD.
Intel plans on combining the different silicon through its 3D packaging technology, which can stack the chip tiles on top of each other.
"Using unique packaging technology, we can take the hybrid architecture that launched on Alder Lake and will be refreshed with Raptor Lake, and now disaggregate the tiles,” said Intel SVP Jim Johnson. “And now the tile can also match up with the unique process node capabilities, performance-leading nodes, IOs, things like that—stable, high-volume nodes that you can depend on."
Johnson called the tile approach “disaggregated architecture,” which promises to create chips that’ll offer top performance in “compute, AI and graphics” in a single package. “What that allows us to do is each tile can be architected and designed for the needs of specific segments."
The company also plans on using the tile-based architecture with Meteor Lake, a CPU family scheduled to arrive in 2023, a year before Arrow Lake. Whether Meteor Lake will mix and match Intel IP with TSMC IP remains unclear. But the chips will be combined with tile-based GPUs capable of offering discrete graphics-like performance.
Intel’s presentation slide also notes the company will continue the disaggregated architecture after 2024 and beyond with an upcoming Lunar Lake CPU family.
In the short-term, Intel is preparing a successor to its 12th Generation Core “Alder Lake” CPUs with a new family called “Raptor Lake,” which is slated to ship in Q2 2022.
Like the 12th Generation, Raptor Lake will also use a hybrid CPU architecture revolving around Performance cores and Efficiency cores on a single chip. The Performance cores are designed to handle the most intensive CPU tasks while the Efficiency cores can run background processes and multi-tasking.
At Thursday's event, Intel demoed a Raptor Lake chip featuring eight Performance cores and 16 Efficiency cores for a total of 32 threads. The upcoming chip family will max out at 24 cores and will offer “up to double digit performance increases,” according to Johnson.
