While Intel has its own foundries and processes it can use to manufacture processors and other components, the company has leaned on the expertise of TSMC for recent products. It seems that relationship will continue a while longer as Team Blue is apparently buying up capacity of its business partner’s N2 node.
As Economic Daily News reports, Intel is joining AMD and Apple in grabbing a slice of TSMC’s cutting-edge process. The Taiwanese manufacturer will begin mass production of its N2 node later in 2025, meaning that products using 2nm wafers will hit the market in the next few years after.
Intel hasn’t confirmed it plans to use TSMC N2 but the most likely use case for the process node would be its upcoming Nova Lake processors. More specifically, for the CPU’s compute tiles, as the company will almost certainly use other less-advanced nodes for the likes of graphics, I/O, and SoC tiles.
The question then becomes how much Intel will rely on TSMC nodes in place of its own. Arrow Lake CPUs take shape entirely outside of Intel’s fabs, but this was likely in part due to the cancellation of its 20A process. With Intel 18A up and running and on track to produce Panther Lake mobile processors, a part-return to in-house manufacturing for Nova Lake seems entirely plausible.
Information on Nova Lake is scarce, but it will likely serve as the proper successor to Arrow Lake desktop offerings as Intel plugs the gap with Arrow Lake Refresh chips. Sadly, it seems that this proper jump will require an altogether new LGA1954 socket, making upgrades with existing motherboards impossible.
Until Nova Lake shows face then, it seems the best we can hope from Intel is a Core Ultra 9 285K with some extra firepower behind it. To temper expectations, think along the lines of Core i9-13900K to Core i9-14900K. That’s if prior rumours that all we can expect are improvements to AI performance don’t ring true.
Happy as I am with AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D ruling the roost and pushing performance boundaries for the moment, I am hopeful that Nova Lake will make for a return to form for Intel. We need competition in the CPU space, and continued partnerships with TSMC could see Team Blue find its fighting spirit once more.
Expect to hear more from both AMD and Intel on their processor plans come Computex 2025. I’ll be on the showfloor come the time, so make sure to follow Club386 on Google News so you don’t miss a thing from the event.
