Some exciting news about Intel’s 14th Gen Meteor Lake processors has surfaced. It would seem that the Meteor Lake desktop lineup hasn’t been canceled but nerfed. The Meteor Lake-S desktop family will be limited to the entry-level/midrange Core i3 and i5 processors. The same chips will form the Meteor Lake-P family and power the next generation of notebooks. Like other hybrid core architectures, it’ll feature only two high-performance “Redwood Cove” cores, the rest being low-power Crestmont cores.
This move can be seen as a direct response to the poor power efficiency and, in turn, the battery life on the Intel 12th and 13th Gen notebook processors.
The Meteor Lake-P block diagram can be seen above. It consists of four disaggregated dies fabbed on different process nodes. The CPU complex die (fabbed on the internal 4nm node) will have two Redwood Cove “P” and eight Crestmont “E” cores. In addition, the Intel 4 die will house the clock generator, memory controller, and L3 cache.
The graphics and SoC tiles will be fabbed on TSMC’s 4nm and 6nm process nodes, respectively. The former will be based on the Gen 12.7 Xe graphics architecture with up to 64EUs or 512 shaders. Interestingly, the SoC die will integrate two LP (Low-Power) Crestmont “E” cores, making this a more complex chiplet processor than initially anticipated.
A leaked slide shows that the 14th Gen Meteor Lake-S lineup will consist of only Core i3 and i5 SKUs. The higher-end Core i7 and i9 models will be introduced with Arrow Lake-S sometime in the second half of 2024. It looks like the Raptor Lake-S Refresh will slot alongside the midrange Meteor Lake-S parts for the first half of the cycle, only to be replaced by Arrow Lake towards the end. It’s worth noting that the 14th Gen lineup will be the first to ditch DDR4 memory, exclusively supporting only DDR5.
Sources: InstLatX64, Bionic_squash.
