Intel Arrow Lake CPUs Rumored To Drop 20A Node, Utilizing TSMC 3nm Instead

Intel's next-gen Arrow Lake CPUs were going to be the first to be built upon the 20A process node but those plans have allegedly changed as the company now focuses on using TSMC's 3nm node.

There had been some rumors circulating that Intel might have dropped its 20A process node which was going to play a big role in the development of the next-gen Arrow Lake CPUs. The first rumors came from Twitter fellow, @Xinoassassin1, who stated that Intel might be dropping 20A in favor of TSMC's 3nm node. It had been pointed that TSMC's N3B node was in discussion to be the potential candidate for Arrow Lake which is the baseline version of TSMC's 3nm process node which entered production in 2H 2022.

https://twitter.com/xinoassassin1/status/1676212766573748224

The TSMC 3nm product roadmap also included N3P and N3P which offer higher performance and also lower power. Meanwhile, Intel 20A was looking to be a very strong competitor to TSMC's 3nm offerings but it looks like Arrow Lake might be missing out on that since another leaker has pointed out this potential design change.

According to Golden Pig Upgrade who is very accurate with his leaks, it looks like this rumor might indeed be true as the same thing has been said by him. It is revealed that Intel's latest roadmap is no longer listing 20A and the company has gone to an external foundry (referring to TSMC & 3nm) for the production of Arrow Lake CPUs.

We know from Intel's own presentation that the CPU "Compute Tile" was meant to utilize the Intel 20A process node while the GPU tile was going to be based upon the TSMC 3nm node. Additionally, other nodes were going to be utilized for the rest of the titles which include the IO and the SOC tile. So it looks like we will see Arrow Lake Compute tile at least on Intel 3 but the rest should mostly be using TSMC's 3nm node.

It isn't confirmed though if this change applies to just one specific segment or all segments. Intel is skipping Meteor Lake-S Desktop CPUs in favor of Arrow Lake-S CPUs that are supposed to launch in Q4 2024 or Q1 2025. The company will also be replacing its mobility lineup with the 2nd Gen Core Ultra family based on the Arrow Lake architecture.

So far there's no official confirmation from Intel on this matter but I doubt they'll respond to such rumors for now given that one of these leakers has a very accurate history, it looks very likely that 20A has been pushed back and Chipzilla has to rely on TSMC for one of its major next-gen CPU launches.