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

by Mark Tyson on 25 May 2021, 10:11

Tags: Intel (NASDAQ:INTC)

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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 14th Gen Core series CPUs. Late this year we will see the launch of the 12th gen Alder Lake (10nm SuperFin), followed by 13th 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.



HEXUS Forums :: 4 Comments

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I just fail to see how Intel are so happy about this when it *appears* to make them fall further behind…
Hilarious how they still talk about x86. Still too painful that it was AMD who created x64.
gagaga
Hilarious how they still talk about x86. Still too painful that it was AMD who created x64.

They use the term x86 because x64 is an extended architecture instruction set that sits atop x86 so everything in use in that family of modern processors uses x86 as its baseline.

You don't see AMD calling it x64.
And I was reading this thinking it meant they were actually starting production. So basically they have finalised a design….. they've finalised a few designs only to have to switch them onto different processes and make a total hash of the whole thing.

If I were an Intel employee who had put blood sweat and tears into that design I'd be fuming.

Oh, and that silly press screenshot from a Zoom meeting is just… cringeworthy.

Oh, and also that chap in the bottom photo looks like a doctor telling you about your incurable cancer.