Strapping on his hiking boots, Jarred Walton walks us through Intel’s new outdoor-inspired architectures.

A MD and Intel have traditionally released new processors every year, often with the biggest updates arriving for autumn. 2024 continued that trend, but there are new processors and there are new processors. In what has become mostly a two-year cadence, both AMD and Intel have major architectural overhauls going on, promising bigger changes than the off-year refreshes.

It’s not just about desktop CPUs, either. As another sign of the times, where mobile solutions continue to outsell desktop parts, both companies have laptop-centric designs coming out. Intel even leads off with its mobile-focused Lunar Lake architecture, which has some important differences from the upcoming desktop-centric Arrow Lake designs that we’ll cover here. AMD likewise has its Granite Ridge line of CPUs that target desktops, with Strix Point processors going after the mobile market. Both use AMD’s latest Zen 5 architecture, which we dived into in issue LXF322.

That leaves us with a collection of architectures to discuss from Intel, with numerous changes from the traditional approach we’ve seen in the past. Intel is moving away from being the sole or even primary manufacturer of the silicon used for many elements of its latest CPUs, turning to rival TSMC for many aspects of its multi-tile solutions; AMD has used TSMC for years, and continues to do so. There’s a lot to cover, so let’s plunge into some of Intel lakes.

Intel has multiple new CPU architectures in the works, although the desktop and laptop parts appear to be even more wildly divergent than what AMD is doing with Zen 5. The first parts to launch will be the Lunar Lake processors for laptops and other portable devices. Much like last year’s Meteor Lake, Intel is leading with mobile chips, building on many elements of the previous generation, but with newer, faster and more efficient designs.

As a recap, the previous-generation Meteor Lake (Core Ultra) processors use a multi-tile approach, with four tiles, plus the base Foveros tile. The CPU tile is made using the Intel 4 process node, and sports a hybrid architecture similar to Alder Lake and Raptor Lake desktop parts, with Redwood Cove P-cores and Crestmont E-cores. The GPU tile uses TSMC’s N5 node and handles graphics work. The largest tile is the SoC tile made on TSMC’s N6 node, and it includes an NPU, two lower-power E-cores, the memory controllers, and video decoding support, plus display outputs. Finally, the IO tile also uses TSMC N6, with Thunderbolt 4 and PCIe 5.0 connectivity support.