On February 23, CNMO learned that Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger confirmed that the cooperation with TSMC has been upgraded from 5nm to 3nm. He pointed out that the Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake computing chip chips (CPU tile) to be launched in the fourth quarter of 2024 will be manufactured on TSMC's 3nm process.
A few days ago, Intel hosted an IFS Direct Connect event, and during the Q&A session, Pat Gelsinger answered Tomshardware's questions and reiterated Intel's willingness to make chips for anyone, including competitors such as AMD and Nvidia. He wants to build Intel foundry into a premier foundry that competes directly with TSMC in terms of technology and capacity, and there is a clear difference between Intel products and Intel foundry. In fact, later this year, Intel foundry will be legally separate from Intel as a separate entity, with the goal of serving customers around the world.
Pat Gelsinger believes that the only way for Intel foundry to compete with TSMC is to provide customers with the most advanced semiconductor manufacturing technology and innovative 3D packaging technology, not just their own products, which means that the chips produced by Intel foundry are also direct competitors to Intel products. If Intel foundry wants to grow further, it can't be selective and discriminatory against customers, and it needs to open its doors to the entire industry and work with everyone in the industry.
In addition to opening up cutting-edge semiconductor manufacturing technologies to third parties, Intel Foundry's medium-term goal is to enter the semi-custom market. In Pat Gelsinger's vision, Intel foundry can provide customers with semi-custom chips that mix different IPs, such as Intel Compute Modules with IA cores and NVIDIA GeForce RTX graphics modules.