Chiplet Chat: Q&A With Intel's Tim Wilson, SoC Design Head for 'Meteor Lake' CPUs

22.09.2023 - 20:41 / pcmag.com / Meteor Lake

At Intel Innovation, a two-day event held in San Jose, Calif., the chip maker made official the unveiling of its anticipated "Meteor Lake," its next-generation architecture for client computer processors. We explained, in broad strokes, how Meteor Lake chips, which will debut Dec. 14 under the new Intel Core Ultra brand, are structured, and the general design decisions around the new chips. It's the biggest re-imagining of Intel's processors in decades. But our earlier stories are a mere distillation of many hours of briefings and deep dives, presented by Intel in the run-up to the launch, highlighting the design decisions and the underpinnings of the new silicon.

PCMag got a brief audience with Tim Wilson, vice president of the Design Engineering Group and General Manager of SoC Design at Intel. He has been key to the development of Meteor Lake, and we were able to run through some questions and clarifications around the genesis of Meteor Lake. Our conversation is relayed below, edited slightly for brevity and clarity.

PCMAG: Tim, maybe start with a brief introduction, and then we can start to ask some questions?

TIM WILSON: Okay, sure. So, happy to chat with you guys. My name's Tim Wilson. I have led the development of Meteor Lake for the past several years, from inception all the way to product launch here in the next couple of months, Dec. 14, as Pat [Gelsinger, Intel CEO] said this morning. Super excited that we're at that stage, super proud of the product, and happy to talk to you about it, answer any of your questions.

PCMAG: So, let's start with chiplets. The stated advantages of Meteor Lake's chiplet-based design, that we gathered from the Meteor Lake briefings, were these three things: (1) the ability to upgrade a portion of a processor without redesigning a whole monolithic die, (2) the ability to bin or pre-test components before integrating them into a larger die, and (3) the ability to relegate different tiles to different manufacturing processes, or even to different manufacturers. Our question is: Are there any other, less-obvious advantages that Intel will gain from moving to chiplet-based designs in Meteor Lake and future designs?

WILSON: You hit on the big three. We've got a lot of very diverse IP [intellectual property] in our modern client SoCs today. And so, co-optimizing all of them on a single piece of silicon with a single transistor and process-node characterization is starting to put tension on our ability to optimize them all simultaneously. So yeah, one big advantage is being able to partner the IP with the process node that has the characteristics that it values most, right? Call it a "product goodness" optimization ability for us to optimize all components of the