Intel’s new CEO Pat Gelsinger wasted no time. Although he only took over from Bob Swan in February, he had already addressed Intel’s workforce at a general meeting.
According to The Oregonian, Intel told employees they can wait to announce any changes to its manufacturing plans until Gelsinger is on board. This is an interesting wrinkle for the overall manufacturing situation, and it implies that Intel wants an CEO with an engineering background to investigate the situation and possibly make the decision. The Oregonian reports report Intel may have postponed a decision ‘maybe’, not that it would, so the issue can still be discussed.
Intel has promised to decide the future of its manufacturing plans for next-generation chips before the CPUs will have to be in production by 2023. This is the date on which we expect 7nm CPUs to be in the market.
Currently, Intel is focused on Alder Lake and Rocket Lake. The former is Intel’s upcoming hybrid platform that offers up to 16 cores with as many as eight full-size CPU cores and eight nuclear power points. There are rumors that Intel may see some unusual threads here by supporting Hyper-Threading on the big core, but not on the small ones.
Rocket Lake is Intel’s upcoming desktop platform that is still built at 14 nm, but uses an updated microarchitecture based on last year’s Ice Lake mobile processors. Chipzilla indicated that Rocket Lake should deliver up to a 1.19x IPC improvement over and above Comet Lake.
Intel has not officially announced its 7nm products, but the rumor mill believes it is called Meteor Lake. At CES this week, Intel showed Alder Lake running on a laptop, suggesting it will be a mobile first architecture. Alder Lake is expected to arrive on desktops in 2022, clearing the way for Meteor Lake in 2023. If Intel builds this chip in its own factories, we can expect it to start at 7pm. If it uses TSMC or licenses a TSMC process in its own factories, it can opt for 5 nm or possibly 3 nm, depending on TSMC’s own technological ramp and the progress of the node.
Intel may delay the decision by a month or two, but it will take time to implement the process node of another foundry or to design a chip specifically at TSMC. Whatever Intel is going to do, he should start doing it soon.
Intel vs. ‘A Lifestyle Company’
Intel takes the threat of Apple’s M1 very seriously. Gelsinger is said to have told employees: ‘We need to deliver better products to the computer ecosystem than a lifestyle business in Cupertino can do. We must be so good in the future. ”
It’s good to see Intel take the M1 seriously. Apple’s M1 chip hit the market like a bomb. While we are happy to admit that there are still many questions about how Apple’s CPUs will compare to x86 across the breadth and breadth of the software market, the SoC is very good at what it does. Calling Apple a ‘lifestyle business’ under these circumstances is a definite shot in the arm. Alder Lake should be the appropriate comparison point for whatever Mx CPU Apple debut is better, so we’ll be able to figure out with the chip whether Intel’s bravado is justified or not.
It will be very interesting to see what kind of mobile power consumption Intel can benefit from Alder Lake’s hybrid computer architecture, and we expect Intel to improve the x86 performance. However, Gelsinger’s attitude is correct. Both Intel and AMD must respond to the entry of ARM with all they have, or risk the long-term prominence of x86 in the PC and laptop market. AMD has its own Ryzen 5000 mobile chips this year, with the expected 1.19x IPC uplift we’ve already seen on desktop chips. For now, Apple is the only company with a SoC that will realistically compete with the x86 company, but that may change in the future, depending on how the two manufacturers respond.
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