Intel Reportedly Postpones TSMC Order for Arrow Lake Tiles to Q4 2024

The Robert Noyce Building in Santa Clara, California, is the world headquarters for Intel Corporation. This photo is from Jan. 23, 2019. (Credit: Walden Kirsch/Intel Corporation)

(Photo: Walden Kirsch/Intel Corporation) A new report from sources in Taiwan paints a sobering picture of Intel’s CPU plans for next year. The company will supposedly launch Meteor Lake this year, then follow it up with Arrow lake in early 2024. However, sources speaking to DigiTimes report Intel will delay placing its order for Arrow Lake’s tiles from TSMC until the end of 2024. That would mean Intel wouldn’t be able to launch in volume until sometime in 2025. That could deal a huge blow to its launch cadence and leave a massive gap between Raptor Lake and its successor, Arrow Lake. Exacerbating the situation is a new report that there will be no Meteor Lake desktop CPUs. Instead, it’ll be mobile-only, which is a rumor we’ve heard before.

DigiTimes says its sources are “PC makers” in the paywalled article (via Techpowerup).  The report said Intel will use TSMC’s 3nm node for the iGPU in Arrow Lake. It was originally going to use that 3nm node for Meteor Lake’s iGPU tile, so perhaps Intel is sticking with N4 or N5 because that’s coming out this year, supposedly. Since Intel won’t be putting in its Arrow Lake order for almost two years, we wonder what it will do for desktop users between now and then. As we reported previously, these delays have reportedly caused Intel to plan a Raptor Lake refresh this year instead of a Meteor Lake desktop part to replace it. Now a reliable leaker is stating Meteor Lake desktop is indeed cancelled.

This leaked Intel roadmap was the first mention of a Raptor Lake refresh. (Image: Intel)

If that happens, we’ll see a Raptor Lake refresh for desktop later this year. However, it’s unclear what CPU family would come after that. Assuming Meteor Lake isn’t replacing it, Arrow Lake is the actual successor on desktop. If things were on target, we’d see Arrow Lake arriving in the middle of 2024 to replace the boosted Raptor Lake chips.

Intel’s official roadmap shows Arrow Lake arriving in 2024, which is now in question. (Image: Intel)

One of the reasons these reports seem semi-believable is these new CPU architectures all require node shrinks. It’s currently using Intel 7 for Raptor Lake, then moving to Intel 4 for Meteor Lake, formerly known as 7nm. For Arrow Lake, it’s leaving FinFET behind and going to 20A with RibbonFET transistors. Though the compute tile will be Intel 20A, the iGPU will be from TSMC.

As always, until we hear it directly from Intel, we should be cautious about these reports. In Intel’s recent earnings report, CEO Pat Gelsinger affirmed Meteor Lake is still on target for a 2023 launch. Whether that will include a desktop SKU is unknown at this time. “We are at or ahead of our goal of five nodes in four years,” said Gelsinger in the report. “Intel 7 is now in high-volume manufacturing for both client and server. On Intel 4, we are ready today for manufacturing, and we look forward to the MTL (Meteor Lake) ramp in the second half of the year.”

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