Intel’s Lunar Lake is actually made at TSMC

Lunar Lake marks perhaps the first time that an Intel PC processor wasn’t manufactured at Intel.

Intel’s Lunar Lake has four tiles, of which the key tiles — the compute tile and the controller tiles — are built at TSMC, not Intel. Intel’s Meteor Lake also used TSMC for manufacturing, but the key compute tile was built at Intel.

Meanwhile, Intel has launched its own foundry program, talked up a program to achieve five process nodes in four years, and has accepted $8.5 billion from the United States government from the CHIPS Act. So why did Intel turn to TSMC instead?

“Put simply, Lunar Lake picked TSMC as the right technology at that point in time,” Gelsinger said at a post-keynote question-and-answer session at the Computex show in Taipei. “That’s why we ended up using more of it. And obviously, with the results I talked about today, it was a good choice.”

“It’s working well, and next year when we move to Panther Lake, almost all of the tiles will be on Intel so we’ll have made a major move to take advantage of our five nodes in four years and align with 18A for Panther Lake for the client.”

Lunar Lake was supposed to be the first product from Intel built using the company’s 18A process. Instead, that will be Clearwater Forest, a server chip.

It’s still not clear why Intel didn’t have the right product at the right time, given its accelerated product roadmap. But it’s getting there, albeit a little late.