According to a new report, Intel’s 7nm chips — built on what’s known as the Intel 4 process, including 14th-generation Meteor Lake processors — are on track to reach production in the second half of 2022.
Article from DigiTimes (Opens in a new tab) It claims that H2 2022 is still on target for 7nm silicon and that this is the case by sources within Intel itself.
While rumors from DigiTimes typically need to add more spice than the average post count from grapevine in our experience, in this case, speculation seems more likely on the money given the fact that Intel had already claimed as recently as last month that the Intel 4 in The deadline is later this year.
Obviously, it’s nice to hear the re-emphasis somehow, and we can take it as a positive sign that Meteor Lake – which will be the next generation of Raptor Lake CPUs – will not be delayed (and in fact another Intel 4-based silicon, such as Granite Rapids for servers).
Of course, none of this is a guarantee that Intel may not yet hit stumbling blocks with Lake Meteor, but things seem to be going consistently smoothly at the moment.
Analysis: Meteor impact will come sooner than thought?
If you remember, Meteor Lake was up and running a couple of months ago, and if production ramps up at the end of this year as promised, we’re looking at a scenario where 14th generation processors will likely launch in the second quarter of 2023, or maybe even Q1 – when a truly Pay.
That’s good news for consumers, as Meteor Lake will follow in the wake of Raptor Lake, which isn’t expected to debut until around October. No doubt it will also be worrying news for AMD, and its Zen 4 chipset later this year, which will quickly face a new competitor. Although, to be fair, by the time Meteor Lake appears, AMD will likely have Ryzen 7000 models with 3D V-cache ready to take on the battle…
Going back to the potential roadmap for an Intel launch, if we assume the Raptor Lake timeframe is correct in October, it is likely that Meteor Lake will come out at the end of the first quarter (March) feeling very close to launching a new generation. So either Q2 will be the likely target for Lake Meteor, or perhaps Lake Raptor will launch as early as October – in fact, previous rumors had suggested Q3 2022 launch of 13th generation chips (likely in September).
Overall, we think the second quarter of 2023 now appears to be the most likely date for a Meteor Lake release – perhaps with laptop chips coming out first (perhaps some distance away), the possibility of other rumors floating around – in terms of giving Raptor Lake enough breathing room. Although Raptor Lake is more of a temporary generation, in terms of being a minor update to 10nm Alder Lake (the improved 10nm is called the Intel 7 process, somewhat confusingly), before the big drop to 7nm (Intel 4) with Meteor Lake.
Meteor Lake is expected to really push things forward with the benefits of that new process (which, if you remember, took Intel a very long time to come up with). Intel recently set us up to expect 14th-generation processors to run 20% (or more) faster for the same power usage, which means Meteor Lake could see a huge jump in clock speeds — perhaps that’s when we’ll see the first 6GHz plus processors From Team Blue. (In fact, Lake Raptor can probably reach 5.8GHz itself.)
At this point, though, any details are ahead of ourselves, but as a processor generation built on an entirely new node, the potential for what Meteor Lake can offer is distinctly exciting.
