A report from Compal has surfaced alleging that Intel will launch its 11th Gen Rocket Lake CPUs for notebooks by the end of 2020. It’s not clear whether these are the 15W U series parts or the 45W HP chips, but I presume the former. Similar to how Comet Lake-U complemented Ice Lake-U, the Rocket Lake-U lineup will make up for the limited number of Tiger Lake-based devices.
The second part of this report claims that Intel will launch the 10nm Tiger Lake-H lineup for high-performance 45W notebooks in the first quarter of 2021, although memory support will be limited to DDR4. Tiger Lake-U slated for launch later this summer, on the other hand, will use LPDDR5. Chromebooks and other low-end devices based on the 10nm Tremont core (Jasper Lake) are also going to land in the fourth quarter of 2020.
Lastly, the note mentions that while Intel continues to focus on 14nm parts for the remainder of 2020 (volume production), 2021 will be all about 10nm lineups. First, we’ll see Ice Lake-SP (in strength), followed by Tiger Lake-H in the first half with Sapphire Rapids for servers and Alder Lake for mainstream desktop PCs in the second half of 2021. It appears that there will be no 14nm based products in 2021 from Intel. Sound too good to be true? Probably, but it’s high time.
It’s unclear whether all these CPUs will leverage Intel’s own 10nm process or if they’ll be outsourced to TSMC, but I’m willing to bet on the former. Intel has been funneling a lot of resources to ramp up 10nm volume production. It’d be pretty damn sad if that still wasn’t enough and the company is forced to use a third-party fab.
