Intel announced on Thursday that it had begun shipments of its 14th Generation Core ‘Meteor Lake’ processors to PC makers. The multi-tile CPUs are set to be officially launched on December 14, but they have been in mass production for quite some time and the company has been shipping for weeks now.
“In Q3, we began initial shipments of Meteor Lake on Intel 4, which we are now aggressively ramping on the most productive fleet of EUV tools in the industry, providing us with a greater than 20% capital efficiency advantage, compared to when EUV tools were first launched,” said Pat Gelsinger, chief executive of Intel, at the company’s earnings call. “The Intel Core Ultra has been shipping to customers for several weeks and will officially launch on December 14 alongside our 5th Gen Xeon.”
It is noteworthy that Intel is producing key silicon for its Meteor Lake processors — its compute tile — on Intel 4 process technology (previously known as 7nm, the company’s first production node to use extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography) at two fabs. One is located near Portland, Oregon, another is near Leixlip, Ireland. Using two fabs to produce components will ensure that Intel will make sufficient volume of Meteor Lake CPUs.
“High volume EUV manufacturing [of Meteor Lake] is well underway in Oregon and more recently in Ireland,” said Gelsinger. “Our Fab 34 in Ireland represents the first high volume EUV production in Europe, underscoring our commitment to establish geographically diverse and resilient supply.”
Intel’s Meteor Lake will be the company’s first multi-tile processor for client PCs. The CPU is set to comprise of four tiles connected using Foveros 3D packaging technology (so, one can think of this design as a five-tile architecture since the base die is also made in a clean room): a compute tile packing Ocean Cove high-performance CPU cores, energy-efficient Gracemont cores, an AI accelerator, a graphics tile featuring a GPU based on Intel’s Xe-LPG architecture, an SoC die integrating such things as a memory controller, a PCIe controller, and a Thunderbolt controller, and an I/O tile.
Intel expects its Meteor Lake processors to offer unprecedented level of performance efficiency and set the stage for a new class of PCs featuring built-in generative AI acceleration.
