Intel executive William Grimm: production of the Intel 4 process based on EUV lithography has not been launched in the production plant

Thanks to CTOnews.com netizen OC_Formula for the clue delivery! CTOnews.com August 30 news, recently, foreign media ascii.jp interviewed Pat Stover, senior director of Intel technology development, and William Grimm, director and vice president of logical technology and development product engineering, to reveal new news about Intel's follow-up processor development.

CTOnews.com summarizes the information disclosed by William Grimm as follows:

Currently, the Intel 4 process is only in mass production at the D1 plant in Oregon. This includes all D1C / D1D / D1X, with a total output of 40000 units per month. However, this is the sum of all process nodes, not just 40000 of Intel 4.

Ireland's Fab 34 is the first Intel 4 production plant, but it is currently running test chips and has not yet reached mass production.

There is nothing equivalent to Intel 7 +, the minor upgrade of Intel 7 adopted by Raptor Lake (or Intel 4 +).

It is not possible to answer whether the Intel 4 uses a dustproof film assembly. TSMC has successfully made a film-free EUV exposure, while Samsung has a film. Intel used thin films in the early days, but the status of Intel 4 is not clear.

Intel 4 is the first Intel process to use extreme Ultraviolet (EUV). According to the reverse engineering data provided by IC Knowledge, the performance of Intel 4 process is better than that of TSMC 5nm and close to 3nm process, but William insists that "it is very difficult to compare Intel 4 with existing nodes in other contract factories, so it only implements its own PPA with reference to external benchmarks".

According to the sample shown by William, the size of the Meteor Lake processor is quite large, but only the upper left part of the CPU is manufactured using the Intel 4 process.

Foreign media also predicted that according to the previously exposed wafer chart, even if the yield is 50%, it can guarantee the production of 365 chips per wafer, and it is easy to produce 365,000 CPU per month.

Intel will hold a two-day Innovation 2023 (Innovation 2023) event from September 19, during which the schedule of all meetings has been announced, confirming that the next generation Meteor Lake processor architecture will be showcased.