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Following the spread of rumors claiming that Intel’s upcoming 3nm CPU products would be hit with delays, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has fired back with confirmation that the new chips are indeed on track for their planned 2024 releases.
The CPUs under development, which will be built on the Intel 3 or TSMC N3 – both new 3nm processes – include product lines codenamed “Arrow Lake”, “Granite Rapids”, and “Sierra Forest”. Arrow Lake is apparently the one we’re most interested in here; that’s the current code name for Intel’s 15th generation consumer desktop processors.
We’ll try not to get ahead of ourselves here, as we’re currently only using Intel’s 13th Gen Core CPUs (headed by the mighty Intel Core i9-13900K), but the 3nm process is intriguing. Intel’s incoming 14th generation “Meteor Lake” chips will still be built on the current 4nm process.
In Intel’s Capital Allocation Conference Call Update, Gelsinger described the rumors as “patently false” and offered assurances that “the 3nm programs are on track, both with TSMC and our internal Intel 3 programs.” The Granite Rapids program, which will be server-grade CPUs for commercial use, could be a concern for Google – the search engine giant has its own plans to produce chips for data centers.
Analysis: Meteor Lake may be bland, but Arrow Lake won’t be
Last year, we found out that Intel actually delayed the 14th generation Meteor Lake chips, which would be produced on TSMC’s 3nm process. Despite the ‘Raptor Lake’ 13th generation being part of the best processors we’ve seen once, there are concerns that Meteor Lake will see smaller generation improvements.
However, that certainly shouldn’t be the case for Arrow Lake in 2024 – since Intel doesn’t use its own Intel 3 process to produce these consumer CPUs, TSMC has plenty of time to refine its N3 process. The Taiwanese manufacturer will be very experienced with 3nm by the time Arrow Lake goes into production, so we should get the optimal version of Intel’s 3nm designs.
Meteor Lake is expected to launch sometime this year, although we’ll likely have a few more 13th Gen chips to go before a new flagship arrives. Intel has maintained a seriously fast release cadence for its CPUs, something we don’t fully support – the speed at which these new chips arrive means that while some immediately outshine their predecessors, others are a bit harder to justify.
Of course, all of this is likely to be quite troubling to AMD executives, who were most likely hoping that the rumors of an Arrow Lake delay were true. While team red has had some success to measure up to Intel’s current-generation offerings (and is often silent the cheaper option), Intel is steaming ahead with ever more powerful CPUs and threatens to leave its competitors in the dust.
