Intel’s Q4 2022 earnings report was a debacle. The chipmaker’s revenue was down across the board, with operating revenue of under a billion for both the server and client businesses. However, the future may yet redeem Team Blue. The chipmaker is on track to mass produce its advanced process nodes through 2023 to 2025. Team Blue promises a volume ramp of five EUV nodes in the next four years, namely Intel 4, Intel 3, 20A, and 18A.
The 14th Gen Meteor Lake family leveraging the Intel 4 process is ready for mass production, and the volume ramp is planned for the year’s second half. It will use a chiplet design, with the CPU, GPU, and IO dies leveraging heterogeneous manufacturing technologies, including Intel 4 and TSMC 5nm, 6nm, etc. Meteor Lake was supposed to precede Arrow Lake, a desktop-centric design with 8P and 16E cores (vs. 6P+16E on MTL).
Unfortunately, we didn’t hear a peep about Arrow lake at Intel’s Q4’22 earnings call. This is rather unexpected as Arrow Lake has been on all the recent marketing slides shared by the chipmaker. Intel, instead, directly moved onto Lunar Lake, another mobile-centric architecture meant for ultra-thins and convertibles.
Normally, this wouldn’t be an issue but Intel’s track-record is far from pretty. Products first disappear from an earnings call, then the investor reports, and finally the roadmap. Arrow Lake is unconventional because it will supposedly feature entirely different core architectures and process nodes despite being part of the same generation alongside Meteor Lake. Two process nodes across a span of 12-15 months sound unlikely anyway.
