Intel’s Lunar Lake might be a specialised low-power PC chip

Intel executives disclosed that 2024’s Lunar Lake chip might be optimized for ultraportables for 15 watts and under, whereas reiterating that 2023’s Meteor Lake chip remains to be on monitor. And if you happen to haven’t guessed it already, the way forward for Intel’s processors continues to be “disaggregated” designs that can embrace numerous application-specific tiles all working in live performance.

All that is scheduled to be talked about at this week’s Scorching Chips convention, a tutorial convention the place, sometimes, current merchandise are dissected by their designers. Intel chief govt Pat Gelsinger will ship a keynote titled “Semiconductors Run the World,” which can discuss how semiconductors have gotten extra specialised by the mixing of assorted capabilities. A lot of big-name chip corporations, together with AMD, Arm, Mediatek, Nvidia, and Samsung will be a part of Tesla and smaller startups to speak about their very own advances.

It’s not particularly possible that Intel’s personal product groups will reveal any main information on the present. Nevertheless, Boyd Phelps, company vp of Intel’s design engineering group, and normal supervisor of shopper engineering, stated that Intel is scheduled to current a paper on Meteor Lake and Arrow Lake, with an emphasis on discussing how the tiles are linked utilizing Intel’s Foveros structure. Foveros, which stacks logic dies vertically, was first launched within the 2019 “Lakefield” chip.

Intel

Now, the emphasis is just to attach discrete logic dies inside a single bundle. A decade in the past, all the dies would merely logic blocks of a single monolithic chip. Now, they’re particular person dies, a part of Meteor Lake’s tiled structure Intel outlined in February. Whereas Intel characterizes Meteor Lake as being manufactured on its Intel 4 manufacturing expertise, that’s a little bit of a misnomer. Meteor Lake’s GPU tile might be constructed by TSMC (on its N5 course of), and the SOC and IO expander tiles use TSMC’s N6 expertise. The CPU tile is constructed in-house by Intel on the Intel 4 expertise. It’s linked collectively by a form of passive interface, which makes use of the Foveros expertise, Boyd defined.

Intel’s current roadmap requires Meteor Lake to tape out for testing in 2022, however ship in 2023. Intel’s Arrow Lake (which can use Intel’s 20A course of) is scheduled for 2024.

Based on Phelps, Meteor Lake and Arrow Lake will seem in notebooks, desktop PCs, and servers. Nevertheless, Phelps disclosed that “Lunar Lake,” a 2024 chip (utilizing the 18A) course of, might be “optimized for 15 watts and under.” Beforehand, Intel has solely stated that Arrow Lake could be “optimized for extremely low energy efficiency.” The disclosure, along side the query about goal markets, implies that Lunar Lake might be a specialised structure for thin-and-light notebooks or tablets.

AMD will seem at Scorching Chips to speak in regards to the Ryzen 6000, the processor it launched in February. Lots of the displays will concentrate on AI and embedded functions; Nvidia, for instance, is scheduled to speak about its Orin platform for autonomous machines and robots in addition to its Grace CPU “superchip”. MediaTek will talk about its Dimensity 9000 smartphone processor. One intriguing paper, by researchers at Yale, will define HALO, described as a “low energy processing cloth for brain-computer interfaces.”