Intel may have temporarily shelved its 14th Gen Meteor Lake-S desktop processors. The next-gen Core offerings are primarily designed for notebooks and gaming laptops in mind. Consequently, the P-core counts are capped at 6, and the E-cores top out at 8. All in all, we get 14 cores on the top-end SKUs with boost clocks of close to 6GHz. The P-cores will leverage the Redwood Cove architecture, while the E-cores will be upgraded to Crestmont.
According to sources close to Moore’s Law is Dead, OEMs are currently only working on notebook variants of Meteor Lake. The desktop variants may be planned, but for the time being, they aren’t being actively worked upon by vendors. Rumors have claimed that the desktop chips will be identical to their notebook counterparts with a 6P+8E (14) core configuration, a disaggregated I/O die, and a tGPU die fabbed on TSMC’s 5nm process node. This would theoretically make it easier to modify the notebook chips into desktop parts.
Arrow Lake-S was supposed to succeed Meteor Lake-S in the desktop department with up to 24 cores (8P + 16E) fabbed on the 20A (2nm) process node alongside a larger iGPU tile, but we haven’t heard anything about that in quite a while. If this rumor is true, Raptor Lake-S and its succeeding refresh maybe Intel’s sole desktop lineup for over two years.
