Intel May Postpone Manufacturing Decision, Focuses On Beating Apple

Intel’s new CEO Pat Gelsinger wasted no time. While he won’t succeed Bob Swan until February, he’s already addressed Intel staff in a meeting at all.

According to The OregonianIntel told assembled employees it could wait to announce any changes to its manufacturing plans until Gelsinger is on board. It’s an interesting wrinkle in the overall manufacturing situation, and it implies that Intel wants a CEO with an engineering background to look at the situation and possibly make the decision. Then again, the Oregonian reports that Intel “may” postpone a decision, not that it would, so the matter may still be under discussion.

Intel is committed to deciding the future of its next-generation chip manufacturing plans before these processors go into production by 2023. This is the approximate date we would expect the processors to be. 7 nm are on the market.

Currently, Intel is focused on Alder Lake and Rocket Lake. The first is Intel’s upcoming hybrid platform that will offer up to 16 cores with up to eight full-size processor cores and eight low-power cores. There are rumors that Intel could achieve unusual thread count here by supporting Hyper-Threading on large cores but not on small ones.

Rocket Lake is Intel’s next desktop platform which is still built on 14nm but uses an updated microarchitecture based on last year’s Ice Lake mobile processors. Chipzilla indicated that Rocket Lake is expected to offer up to 1.19x CPI improvement beyond Comet Lake.

Intel hasn’t officially revealed its 7nm product line, but it is rumored to be called Meteor Lake. At this week’s CES, Intel showed Alder Lake running in a laptop, implying it will be a mobile architecture first. Alder Lake is likely to hit desktops in 2022, paving the way for Meteor Lake in 2023. If Intel builds this chip in its own factories, we can expect it to debut at 7nm. If he uses TSMC or licenses a TSMC process in his own factories, he can opt for 5nm or possibly 3nm depending on TSMC’s technology ramp and node progress.

Intel may postpone this decision for a month or two, but it takes time to implement another foundry’s process node or to design a chip specifically at TSMC. Whatever Intel does, it has to do it soon.

Intel vs. ‘A Lifestyle Company’

Intel takes Apple’s M1 threat very seriously. Gelsinger reportedly told employees, “We need to deliver better products to the PC ecosystem than anything possible than a lifestyle business in Cupertino. We must be just as good in the future. “

It’s good to see Intel taking the M1 seriously. Apple’s M1 chip has hit the market like a bomb. While we’re happy to acknowledge that there are still a lot of questions about how Apple’s processors will stack up against x86 across the breadth and breadth of the software market, the SoC is very good at what it does. he does. Calling Apple a “lifestyle company” under these circumstances is a sure hit through the arc. Alder Lake should be the proper benchmark for any higher performance Mx processor that Apple has launched, so with this chip we’ll find out whether Intel’s bravado is justified or not.

It will be very interesting to see what kinds of mobile power consumption benefits Intel can derive from Alder Lake’s hybrid computing architecture, and we expect Intel to continue to improve x86 performance. Gelsinger’s attitude, however, is the right one. Intel and AMD must respond to ARM’s encroachment with all they have, or risk x86’s long-term dominance in the desktop and laptop market. AMD has its own Ryzen 5000 mobile chips coming this year, with the expected 1.19x CPI increase that we have already seen on desktop chips. For now, Apple is the only company with an SoC that will realistically compete with either of the x86 companies, but that could change in the future, depending on how the two manufacturers react. .

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