Intel has announced details of Meteor Lake processors, in which the company will use chiplet design and the new Intel 4 process technology with EUV lithography for the first time in the client segment. The first members of the family, which will lose the letter “i” in the name and instead be called Core Ultra, will be presented on December 14th. These are mobile chips for advanced laptops.
Image source: Intel
Meteor Lake processors consist of four chiplets: CPU, GPU, SoC and I/O. Two crystals – GPU and SoC – are manufactured at TSMC facilities using technical processes N5 and N6 (5 and 6 nm, respectively). Intel produces the CPU chiplet itself using Intel 4 (7 nm) process technology. The combination of chiplets into a whole is carried out using proprietary Foveros technology.
Meteor Lake’s design is focused on energy efficiency. Intel promises that the new chip will offer similar performance to the current Raptor Lake phones but use half as much power. This allows more powerful chips to be used in thinner laptops or powerful laptops to be made thinner.
Meteor Lake processor cores received new architectures: powerful P-cores will offer the Redwood Cove architecture, while Crestmont will be chosen for the E-cores. Meteor Lake also has separate “Low voltage e-cores“, which are housed in the SoC chiplet. This allows computers to operate in low power mode without using the CPU chiplet, which may consume the most power.
The use of three core types forced Intel to redesign the hardware scheduler Thread Director, which is responsible for distributing tasks among different threads. The cores are loaded with work, starting with the most economical. P cores are used last.
An AI coprocessor NPU with VLIW architecture has been added to the SoC chiplet, focusing on the parallel execution of multiply-accumulate operations. Intel is actively working with software developers to ensure AI applications leverage the capabilities of the NPU. During the presentation, Intel demonstrated the operation of various AI systems in local mode, without access to the cloud or other external servers. In general, Meteor Lake’s marketing will be based on the thesis that it is the first AI processor capable of fast and energy-efficient inference on a local system.
The integrated GPU in Meteor Lake is from Iris Meteor Lake will come with support for hardware-accelerated ray tracing and XeSS AI upscaling. Intel promises a 2x increase in performance compared to Iris Xe.
The I/O chiplet supports Thunderbolt 4 and PCIe 5.0. The SoC chiplet in turn supports Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 7 as well as DisplayPort 2.1 and HDMI 2.1.
The composition and properties of the Meteor Lake series are unknown, but Intel revealed “provisionally» MSI laptop with new processor with six P-cores and eight E-cores.
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