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TechPowerUp: "Intel Lunar Lake-MX SoC with On-Package LPDDR5X Memory Detailed"
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this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023
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My two best guesses for why TSMC N3B is used for the compute tile:
The Compute Tile has the x86 Cores, NPU, and iGPU. Because of this, 20A couldn't be used. It could've been either Intel 3, N3B, or wait for 18A. N3B was likely the best choice
ARL and LNL were developed in Tandem, one using internal foundries, the other external, as a post-10nm risk mitigation. Development for these CPUs likely began somewhere around 2020.
As Intel themselves confirmed, 18A lead product(E core Xeon and Panther Lake) won't be out until mid to late 2025. So either they keep using N3 and launch LNL in late 2024 or delay it by a year with a risk of even further delays and have it launch alongside with M4, QC's second gen X chips, Refreshed Zen 5 APUs , etc. 20A is probably similar to Intel 4 in that it's not really a complete node.
Also they also have to use all the TSMC N3 allocation they bought up for something. Since Battlemage is rumored to make use of N4, Celestial should be 2 years after BMG per usual GPU cadence