Intel’s 14th Gen Meteor Lake processors will land in the year’s second half. Leveraging the Redwood Cove “P” and Crestmont “E” cores on the Intel 4 process node, it’ll be a notebook-centric design with up to 14 cores (6P + 8E). Well-known tipster @Raichu has shared the (expected) block diagrams of the two core architectures, showing notable improvements in cache, bandwidth, and branch prediction:
Compared to Golden Cove, Redwood Cove will be a less drastic change, leaving the decoders and execution units intact. The instruction cache (I-Cache) will be doubled from 32KB to 64KB, while the L2 will be redesigned for faster prefetch and higher memory bandwidth. The micro-op queue will be expanded from 144 on Golden Cove to 192 on Redwood Cove.
The branch predictor will also be fine-tuned (without providing concrete details), while the instruction execution latency of vector instructions will be reduced.
Gracemont was a massive upgrade from Tremont, greatly widening the core, cache, bandwidth, and retire/rename buffers. Crestmont mainly focuses on the reorder and renaming buffers while drastically improving the prediction bandwidth. The L2 cache may also be expanded with support for 128b/256b VNNI (vector neural instructions).
In addition to updated core architectures and process nodes, Meteor Lake will support faster DDR5/LPDDR5X memory and enhanced low-power modes. In addition to the 4nm compute die, some Crestmont cores will be housed on the more mature SoC die. There’s also talk of an Adamantine (L4) Cache 3D stacked beneath the SoC/compute dies using Foveros packaging exclusive to the CPU for enhanced gaming performance. We should see the first Meteor Lake notebooks hit the market this fall.
