Intel Meteor Lake CPUs Sapphire Rapids Xeons & Ponte Vecchio GPUs Fabbed and Photographed

It has been discovered that the first die photos of numerous next-generation Intel Meteor Lake CPUs, Sapphire Rapids Xeons, and Ponte Vecchio GPUs have been captured at the chipmaker's Fab 42 in Arizona, United States. The chips are now being tested and manufactured at the facility.

A multi-chip module known as "MCM is being applied to Meteor Lake which uses Intel's Foveros packaging technology to integrate "tiles" that are fabricated using multiple silicon fabrication processes depending on their function and transistor-density/power needs. It integrates four separate tiles into a single package: the compute tile, which contains the CPU cores; the graphics tile, which contains the integrated graphics processor; the SoC I/O tile, which handles the processor's platform I/O; and a fourth tile, which is not yet known. This could be a memory stack with functionalities comparable to those of the HBM stacks on the "Sapphire Rapids," or it could be something completely else altogether.

Die images were taken by Stephen Shankland, a senior reporter for CNET who traveled to Intel's Fab 42 in Arizona, United States, to cover the event. The Fabrication plant is where all of the magic happens, as it manufactures next-generation chips for consumers, data centers, and the high-performance computing portions of the market. The Fab 42 will be responsible for the production of Intel's next-generation processors, which will be manufactured on the 10nm (Intel 7) and 7nm (Intel 4) manufacturing nodes. The Meteor Lake processors, Sapphire Rapids Xeon processors, and Ponte Vecchio GPUs for high-performance computing are just a few of the items that will benefit from these next-generation nodes in the near future.

The beautiful photos below are courtesy of CNET.