Intel has taken the next step toward its first ever 7nm CPU, the Meteor Lake chiplet, which will follow Alder Lake later this year in 2023, has just completed the final design phase before entering the manufacturing process.

The final chip components have now been assembled into a single package for the first time as a "tape-in" design, ready for the final "tape-out" design phase prior to manufacturing.

Gregory Bryant, Intel's Senior VP and GM of the Client Computing Group, tweeted a screenshot of an online meeting yesterday to mark the milestone achievement.

This is a double thumbs up for us, but the big question is who Intel will be taping with. Intel has remained silent so far, and the company's outsourced manufacturing strategy remains unclear. In an Intel Newsroom article,

"Intel's global network of in-house factories for at-scale manufacturing is a key competitive advantage that enables product optimization, improved economics, and supply resiliency. Today, Gelsinger reaffirmed the company's outlook to continue to manufacture the majority of its products internally"

.

So while it was confirmed that some Xe GPUs will use "external foundries" like TSMC, the new 7nm SoC tapeouts will likely be manufactured by Intel's internal foundries.

The article continues, "The company's 7nm development is well underway with the increased use of extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) in a redesigned and simplified process flow. Intel plans to tape-in its first 7nm client CPU (codenamed "Meteor Lake") compute tile in the second quarter of this year."

And it did.

Hopefully, once this pandemic fiasco is over, the next stage will bring the teams together again to celebrate in person.