INTEL 2.0

Graphics chips such as AMD's Navi 21 GPU have long been a TSMC specialty.

Intel’s woes with its 10nm process node have already been well documented. The company’s response is known as IDM 2.0’,a triple-pronged strategy to return Intel to market leadership. Part one is a commitment to fix its fabs and push on to 7nm technology and beyond.

Part two involves using third-party fabs to fill in the gaps in the meantime, given that it will take several years to fix those Intel fabs. And part three? To become a major player itself in the foundry business making chips for customers.

If part one seems like an obvious, if difficult and expensive to execute step, two and three are intriguing, even contradictory. As it turns out, Intel is turning to TSMC for that interim measure of farming out some of its chips to a third party for production.

But TSMC will also, of course, be Intel’s primary competition as it scales up part three of the plan and attempts to win foundry customers. That IntelTSMC relationship sure is going to be interesting.

Indeed, early reports suggest it is already strained. Intel has revealed that TSMC will make the integrated GPU chiplet or tile, known as atGPU, for its Meteor Lake series of processors. Meteor Lake is the architecture that will follow Raptor Lake, the latter being due later this year as a replacement for the incumbent Alder Lake architecture.

Anyway, rumors currently abound regarding delays in Intel’s launch plans for Meteor Lake, pushing planned production from late 2022 to early 2023 and then even later into 2023, and in turn the impact all that will have on TSMC. Analysts at Trendforce even reported that Intel’s delays had forced TSMC to scale back onits plans for 3nm production rollout in 2023.