Intel held a coming-out party Tuesday for its Meteor Lake, the processor that will go on sale Dec. 14. But if you’re trying to decide whether to stick with Intel-powered Windows laptops or move to Apple’s efficient, powerful new MacBooks, pay attention to the three other processors in the works.
At Intel’s Innovation conference, Chief Executive Pat Gelsinger touted a sequence of new processors due to arrive in 2024 and 2025. First are Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake. Then, in 2025, comes Panther Lake, whose design is “well underway,” Gelsinger said, confirming a rumored code name.
In an effort to show the products aren’t vaporware, Gelsinger demonstrated a prototype Lunar Lake computer, an ungainly blue box marked “Lab CSF” and featuring technical controls like “clear cache” and “virtual battery” you won’t see on your average PC. And he held up a wafer built with Intel 18A, the manufacturing process the company hopes will restore the chipmaking leadership it lost to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) and Samsung.
See also: Inside Intel’s Chip Factory, I Saw the Future. It’s Plain Old Glass
Those and other technology demonstrations bode well for a company that struggled for years, according to CCS Insight analyst James Sanders. “You can definitely tell there is a vibe again that Intel is an engineering-led company again,” Sanders said. “That’s the image they need to portray after years being run by accountants.”
At the Intel Innovation conference, CEO Pat Gelsinger holds a wafer built with the Intel 18A manufacturing process the company hopes will restore its chipmaking leadership.
Intel also showed off new Xeon processors for the giant data centers that keep tech giants’ cloud computing services humming, announced that Stability.ai will purchase its Gaudi AI accelerators, and touted new glass substrate technology it expects will make processors faster, more power efficient and larger later in the decade.
AI processors are the biggest processors around, and demand has surged with the explosion in interest in generative AI technology. Intel competitor Nvidia has been the chief beneficiary, but Intel announced Stability.ai, a generative AI imagery company, will buy a Gaudi-based AI supercomputer with Xeon processors overseeing 4,000 Gaudi AI accelerators.
New steps in Intel chip fabrication
Intel is catching up to its rivals in one chipmaking area, the use of extreme ultraviolet light (EUV) to etch finer features onto silicon wafers. It expects to be ahead, at least a little bit, with the next advancement, called high numeric aperture (high NA) EUV.
That should let chipmakers inscribe even smaller features and fit more transistor circuitry onto a processor. But the higher detail with the more advanced EUV process comes at a cost: the maximum size of processor it can make is half the size as with regular EUV. That’s mostly an issue with large processors like AI accelerators, and processor makers can bundle several “chiplets” into one package to compensate.
Intel expects to get the first EUV machine for high-volume chipmaking at the tail end of 2023, Gelsinger said. The sole supplier is Dutch company ASML. Its Intel 18A process could use high NA, but 18A chips also could be made with conventional EUV and more steps in the manufacturing process.
