Intel announces that it has taped-in the Meteor Lake compute tile

Executive Vice President & GM of Intel's Client Computing Group, Gregory Bryant took to Twitter on Monday, to share the celebrations of his team. The milestone they were celebrating was the successful tape-in of the 7nm compute tile for Meteor Lake. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger appeared to be pleased with the news, which he separately shared with investors at the J.P. Morgan Global TMC Week event. We last reported upon the progress of Meteor Lake in a write up of the Intel: Engineering the Future webcast in March.

The term 'tape-in' signifies that the 7nm compute tile design has now been validated, for integration into the Meteor Lake SoC. Intel is building Meteor Lake using its 3D logic stacking Foveros technology, and when all the other SoC constituents are validated, the whole SoC design can be validated or 'taped-out'. Foveros debuted in Intel's Lakefield chips and in this case it will be mixing and matching SoC components from various process nodes.

From the Intel: Engineering the Future webcast

An interesting aspect of Meteor Lake that is not yet clear regards who will fabricate the 7nm compute tiles for the SoC. Meteor Lake processors are expected to be released as Intel's 14^th Gen Core series CPUs. Late this year we will see the launch of the 12^th gen Alder Lake (10nm SuperFin), followed by 13^th gen Raptor Lake in 2022, and it isn't until 2023 that we will expect Meteor Lake to be on the menu. It is possible that Intel could get TSMC to make some Meteor Lake compute tiles, but it aims to make them on its own enhanced 7nm SuperFin node. One must remember though, by 2023 TSMC will be promoting its 3nm node to partners.

Meteor Lake's compute tiles are expected to feature a mix of Ocean Cove and Gracemont cores. Tom's Hardware notes that Meteor Lake enablement code is already present in Linux OS patches. Looking forward to further Intel CPU news flow, we might get some juicy nuggets at Computex shortly, but don't forget that Intel On, following in the spirit of Intel IDF will debut as a hybrid event in October this year.