According to the latest news, Intel has signed a new cooperation agreement with TSMC, which has booked up to 180,000 units of 6nm chips.
This means that the earlier rumors that Intel will use TSMC’s 6nm process on a large scale in 2021 are true, and there are also reports that Intel will continue to use TSMC’s 3nm process for the foundry in 2022.
If Intel plans to produce chips by outsourcing, GPUs are most likely to be produced. Apart from being easier to produce than CPUs, TSMC’s greater experience in GPU manufacturing is also an important factor. Together with the available information, Intel’s monolithic Xe architecture DG1 will be manufactured in a proprietary 10nm process and will be operational by the end of this year.
The DG1 has 768 cores with a fundamental frequency of 1 GHz and an acceleration frequency of 1.5 GHz, making it suitable for the energy-efficient sector, especially for laptop GPUs. The DG2, which will be produced later, has a monolithic display and will be a high-performance CPU, and it now looks like it will be manufactured by TSMC using the 6nm process.