Lunar Lake is a chip-based processor. The majority of these chiplets, which Intel calls tiles, are not manufactured by the company's manufacturing arm, Intel Foundry. Rather, they are built with TSMC, the world's largest foundry. The reason for that decision, Intel CEO says, is simply that TSMC was better.

"Simply put, Lunar Lake chose TSMC as the better process technology at that time," Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said at Computex2024. "That's why we decided to use it more.

"Obviously the result I spoke to today was a good choice. It is working well."

Lunar Lake has 3 tiles: a compute tile, a platform controller tile, and a base tile. The base tile is the only tile created by the Intel process. The other 2 absolutely most important are made by TSMC. The compute tile, which contains all the cores of the GPU and NPU, is created on the N3B node of the TSMC.

The Lunar Lake system-on-chip was built with efficiency in mind, suggesting that TSMC had a better blend of performance, scale, and overall efficiency available on n3B nodes than its own Intel4 or Intel3 nodes.

Gelsinger suggests that this does not apply to code-named Panther Lake, Intel's next-generation mobile chip coming in 2025.

"And next year, when we move to Panther Lake, almost all the tiles are on Intel.

"We took advantage of our five nodes in four years and made a big move to align with Panther Lake for our clients."

Panther Lake will be built on the Intel18A process node and the first wafers will come out of Intel's fabs next week, Gelsinger said.

Five nodes in four years refers to INTEL Foundry's plans to quickly launch process nodes to make it more competitive with TSMC. The 5 nodes are Intel7, Intel4, Intel3, Intel20A, and Intel18A.

Intel announced that the first High-NA EUV process, 14A, will follow after all. It's actually set to make sure the company differentiates itself from TSMC, which has not yet adopted a high NA EUV. This is a bit of a gamble for Intel and it will have to lift new machines, but Intel is seeing this kind of step needed to make the competition leap.