Intel’s 14th generation Core mobile processors, code named “Meteor Lake”, are scheduled for release in December 2023. These will be the first Intel processors built using the Intel 4 process node, which is classified as a “5 nanometre process”, although these geometry designations have become almost entirely marketing-speak by now. The key figure is that the transistor density will be around twice that of Intel’s current high end processors built using the Intel 7 process (previously “10 nanometre Enhanced Super Fin”). These will be the first Intel processors made using extreme ultraviolet lithography, the first to incorporate components made by TSMC as well as in-house by Intel, and the first to incorporate Intel’s Foveros packaging technology to interconnect multiple chiplets (which Intel calls “tiles”) within one package.
The architecture will incorporate advanced power saving features to extend battery life in mobile devices while delivering high performance for burst computing demands. Here is Intel’s “Meteor Lake Architecture Overview”, which is presented as a PDF slide set embedded in a Web page.
The push toward special-purpose cells is sending us further into what Sara Hooker calls “The Hardware Lottery”. While inevitable, the degree to which it is happening is driven by an increasingly medieval mindset toward mathematics arising from the quasi-theological structure of academia. It’s been 60 years since G. Spencer Brown brought to our attention the need for a radical reorientation of logic to incorporate imaginary logic states, just as physics, at least since Euler, recognized by its incorporation of complex numbers to describe dynamical systems.
Generalizations of Boolean algebra in geometric algebra (where complex numbers are geometric rotations) are available in the context of generalizing Turing machines to be space-like as well as time-like – which is essential for a general theory of parallel computation. Unfortunately, “The Greatest Mathematician of the Twentieth Century” Grothendieck, pursued “algebraic geometry” which confusingly is unrelated to geometric algebra. Sheesh.
