Intel's 7nm chip manufacturing node, aka Intel 4, was completed today and will be used in the next generation Meteor Lake processor family next year, given that Intel 4 and Meteor Lake have been on Intel's roadmap for nearly two years now, scheduled for 2023, This is not strictly news. However, the official confirmation on Monday (open in new tab) that both Intel 4 and Meteor Lake remain on that schedule is well known given Intel's well-documented woes with Intel 7, the node formerly known as 10nm is very big news.

Anne Kelleher, Intel's General Manager of Technology Development, presented the latest roadmap for the 2022 IEEE Electron Device Meeting (opens in new tab). In it, Intel 4 is "production-ready today" and lists Meteor Lake as the first target product for the new node.

The 10nm node or Intel 7 achieved full-scale volume production approximately five years later than Intel originally intended. The Intel 4 or 7nm node is similarly far behind Intel's original plans. However, the company has made tremendous efforts under new CEO Pat Gelsinger to get its chip production technology back on track, and confirmation that Intel 4 is healthy and ready for production is undoubtedly the first important step in Gelissinger's IDM 2.0 master plan (open in new tab)

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Meteor Lake will, of course, be Intel's first consumer chiplet CPU. It will consist of multiple dies, with the CPU core manufactured at Intel4 and the graphics core at Taiwanese foundry TSMC's 5nm node. Further I/O and SoC tiles will be manufactured on legacy Intel nodes, probably Intel 7.

It is worth noting that Intel's 13th generation Raptor Lake CPUs (open in new tab) were just announced in September, and Meteor Lake appears to be on a much more accelerated schedule. However, Meteor Lake is also expected to be limited to six performance cores (opens in new tab), whereas Raptor Lake and its predecessor Alder Lake offered up to eight P-cores.

In other words, it is unlikely that Meteor Lake will directly replace the entire Raptor Lake lineup, including the top Core i7 and Core i9 models. Rather, it seems more likely that Meteor Lake will be a mobile-first design and will be available on desktops on a limited basis, replacing entry-level to mid-range Raptor Lake CPU models.

Intel has the form to do just that, including the Broadwell architecture, the company's first consumer 14nm chip, launched as a mobile chip but without a comprehensive desktop deployment.

Under the new roadmap, the Intel 3 node will be ready late next year, the Intel 20A in early 2024, and the Arrow Lake CPU family with it. The Intel 18A is scheduled for late 2024, an extremely ambitious timeline for Intel. If Intel does all of this, it will go a long way toward closing the gap with TSMC and reaffirming its traditional role as the world's most technologically advanced chipmaker. We will be watching closely.