Intel Evaluating Both TSMC & It’s Own 14A Foundry Process Nodes For Next-Gen Nova Lake CPUs

Intel Evaluating Both TSMC & It’s Own 14A Foundry Process Nodes For Next-Gen Nova Lake CPUs

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Intel Evaluating Both TSMC & It’s Own 14A Foundry Process Nodes For Next-Gen Nova Lake CPUs
Intel Evaluating Both TSMC & It's Own 14A Foundry Process Nodes For Next-Gen Nova Lake CPUs 1

Intel is reportedly evaluating both external & internal foundry process technologies for its next-gen Nova Lake CPUs which are aiming for a 2026 launch.

A recent report from ChinaTimes, citing industry sources, suggests that Intel is in the early stages of the development of its next-gen CPUs, codenamed Nova Lake. According to the supply chain, Intel is planning to leverage TSMC's process technologies for its Nova Lake CPUs but it is also monitoring the development progress of its own 14A process node which is the internal candidate for the next-generation processors.

The report goes on to highlight Intel's recent reliance on TSMC's process node which started with Meteor Lake which utilizes several tiles that can be mixed and matched together. The Core Ultra 100 CPUs utilize a mix of Intel's own and externally produced tiles and Lunar Lake will be the first client product that will have all tiles produced on external nodes from TSMC.

Lunar Lake "Core Ultra 200V" will make its debut on the 3rd of September and the follow-up will be Arrow Lake which is also expected to utilize TSMC's N3 process node on the higher-end desktop variants. Previously, it was reported that Intel's Nova Lake CPUs will utilize TSMC's 2nm process node technology but nothing is set in stone yet. Intel has made its future disaggregated chips so that they are 99% process-node agnostic & don't have to be designed to meet the design analogy of a specific node. We will see this with the Lion Cove P-Core architecture which is compatible with pretty much any node.

Intel hasn't announced Nova Lake CPUs yet considering they still have a lot of products to cover such as Lunar Lake "Core Ultra 200V", Arrow Lake "Core Ultra 200" & Panther Lake "Core Ultra 300" CPUs for clients. The Nova Lake CPUs were recently revealed as a 2026-2027 product in Dell's leak as seen here.

The Intel 14A process node is expected to deliver 15% higher performance per watt versus 18A and it also comes in optimized flavors such as 14A-E which provides an additional 5% boost. Not a lot of details regarding the specific CPU and GPU cores in Nova Lake are known but they do come after Panther Lake chips so we can expect future generations of P-Cores, E-Cores, and Xe cores.

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