It has previously been reported that Intel will only use their 18A process to produce upcoming processors such as Panther Lake, which will replace the Lunar Lake laptop processors, and Nova Lake, which will replace the Arrow Lake processors.
This is because Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake are both manufactured on TSMC's N3 process, while Intel is building out its own 18A semiconductor manufacturing process. Now, it seems that the rumors about Intel working with TSMC again are true as it has been reported that some of the compute tiles have begun to be produced using TSMC's N2 process.
Using the Panther Lake processor as an example, a processor chip will consist of several "tiles", including a compute tile, a GPU tile, an I/O tile (for direct plug-in support to the CPU) and an SoC tile (typically housing components such as low-power E-cores, dedicated graphics chips to power the screen display and media, and support for WiFi).
For the Panther Lake processor, Intel is expected to produce its own compute tiles, but for Nova Lake-S, which will be introduced as Intel's desktop-class processor, replacing Arrow Lake, it will be produced by TSMC again.
Interestingly, the report also says that this compute tile has been sent to Intel's lab for testing, and public expectations are that Intel will produce this compute tile using both its own 18A process and N2, to ensure that the supply of the processor chip is sufficient when Intel launches it later.
Market expectations are also that the Intel Nova Lake-S processor chip will begin mass production in the third quarter of 2026, before it will be introduced to the global market by the end of the year.
The most powerful Intel Nova Lake-S specification is expected to come with as many as 52 physical cores and will support DDR5-8000 memory by default, with the addition of PCIe 5.0 lanes for supporting powerful components.