Semiconductor giant (NASDAQ: INTC) is set to launch its most important PC chip family in years on Dec. 14. Codenamed Meteor Lake, these mobile-only computer processing units (CPUs) will bring a lot of changes all at once. That's an unusual and risky move for Intel but one that makes sense as the company races to advance its manufacturing technology and pull ahead of rival Advanced Micro Devices.

Meteor Lake will be the first set of PC chips from Intel which use a tile-based architecture. In the past, when Intel only manufactured its own chips and didn't make much use of other foundries, this type of architecture wouldn't have made a ton of sense. But the situation has changed. Intel is working on building a foundry business that makes chips for third parties, which means its various manufacturing processes will have much longer lifespans. The company has also embraced using rival Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) for some manufacturing.

A tile-based architecture allows Intel to mix and match manufacturing processes, using the optimal process for each tile instead of using a cutting-edge process for the whole chip. Meteor Lake will use the new Intel 4 process for the compute tile, which houses the CPU cores as well as the mature Intel 16 node for the base die that underlies all the tiles. For everything else, including the graphics processing unit (GPU) tile, Intel will turn to TSMC's 5nm and 6nm processes.

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Source Fool.com