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Comment by bjconlan | Hacker News Reader

I think it indirectly is (in the form of TSMC) as Intel have started to use TSMC fabs for some of their processor lines and I think this is eating into AMD (and other TSMC customers) production.

They had the same problem with apple and the 4nm fabs, but couldn't exactly say anything as smearish.

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It ooks like you're right. A quick check shows Intel outsourced Arrow Lake (or parts of it) to TSMC.

As a side note, I wish Intel would move to a different non-lake naming scheme.

Coffee Lake was cute; but at least it made more sense than a lake made of arrows.

The codenames are supposedly from real places because you can't trademark geographic names.

At the end of 2023, Intel shipped Meteor Lake, where all but one chiplet were made by TSMC. Arrow Lake updates that chiplet (the one with the CPU cores) to also be made at TSMC, though on the older N3B process rather than the better N3E process that AMD is using.

Intel's current low-power laptop processor (Lunar Lake) is also all TSMC. The only thing Intel is making for their current-generation consumer products is the passive silicon interposer all these chiplets are mounted on.

Arrow Lake-U is an updated Meteor Lake on Intel 3.

"The Intel Core Ultra 200U series processors utilize the Redwood Cove (P-core) architecture, which originally debuted in Intel Core Ultra Series 1 processors and Crestmont (E-core) architecture that is found throughout the Intel Core Ultra Series 2 family of processors,” an Intel spokesman said in an email. “However, the Intel Core Ultra 200U series is built on the Intel 3 process node, rather than the Intel 4 process used for Intel Core Ultra Series 1 processors, which helps improve performance of the processor overall."[0]

[0] https://www.pcworld.com/article/2568168/intel-debuts-arrow-l...

Ah, interesting. Intel likes to do weird things with the smallest mobile chips.

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