They probably aren't even taking any N3B wafers, so how would they put Arrow Lake on N3B? I think the original plan was to use both N3B and 20a for Arrow Lake, but obviously that's changed.
They never planned to use N3 for compute tiles. Saying “things changed” is a cop-out. Things
did not change. A bunch of people took a marketing slide and a few other actually legit leaks out of context and got everything mixed up and wrong.
This slide keeps coming up frequently & is being wrongly interpreted. The purple External square indicates TSMC for all other tiles. Not the CPU tile.
As for the ppw gains, Intel has published the data already. 7 -> 4 -> 3 -> 20A. The math is simpler than you think.
Of course it was. I keep telling people this.
No, because if that was true than they would have included TSMC N5 on the "MTL and ARL" section since MTL uses N5 on the iGPU tile. That's been confirmed by Intel themselves. It's only the CPU tiles.
Also you can't multiply PPW like that. We have no idea where on the PPW curve they are getting their numbers.
Literally every leaker is saying it's going to be on TSMC N3 as well lol
The legit ones knew exactly what was going on. Intel has been pretty clear on plans since 2020 or so. Intel CPU compute tiles in client systems will always use an Intel fab unless something unpredictable happens.
Intel has and will continue to use a mix of internal and external fabs for everything else.
Intel does actually plan to eventually move the GPU in-house. It will be a while, however.
Intel has used TSMC for specialty orders (for CPU compute) in the past, but none of those chips were ever sold externally to my knowledge (unless I am forgetting a chip).
They are strongly against using an external fab for core IP for reasons I mentioned in earlier posts.
If Intel fabs run into more issues or they receive a crazy good deal (such as being able to make the chip much cheaper externally) we could possibly see some movement, but until then…