Monday, April 10th 2023
Intel 14th Gen Core Lineup Confirmed to be Meteor Lake CPU Range
The Meteor Lake codename has been linked to the fourteenth generation of Intel's Core lineup for a while, following several significant leaks in 2022 and 2023. According to newly unearthed internal documentation and benchmark data, Intel has confirmed that the Meteor Lake family of CPUs will form its upcoming 14th Gen Core lineup - with laptop variations expected to arrive mid-2023 and heavily speculated desktop units in the fourth quarter, although a middle of the year refresh of Raptor Lake could push the entire Meteor Lake range's release window into 2024.
Meteor Lake is anticipated to be Intel's debuting of a "disaggregated" design - the most advanced laptop CPU variant features a top-of-the-line 6P+8E core configuration. Intel is solely responsible for fabrication of an IOE (I/O) tile (the company's own term for a chiplet) with PCIe 5.0 plus Thunderbolt 4, as well as an SoC tile. The GPU part of the design is rumored to be based on their own Arc Alchemist architecture, and TSMC has been contracted to manufacture this graphics tile - not a big surprise since Intel has also placed substantial manufacturing orders for discrete Arc cards with the Taiwanese foundry.
An internal document (published by Intel) was leaked on Twitter over the past weekend, and it lists hardware support for Intel Media SDK and oneVPL (Video Processing Library) GPU runtimes. On this chart the "Future: 14th Generation Intel Core" series is indicated as being part of the "MTL/Meteor Lake" category. "RPL/Raptor Lake" stays in the 13th Generation Intel Core lineup according to this information - industry insiders have speculated that a refresh of Raptor Lake would result in a jump into Intel's 14th generation.
Sources:
momomo_us Tweet, Dell Inspiron 13 5330 Performance Results
Meteor Lake is anticipated to be Intel's debuting of a "disaggregated" design - the most advanced laptop CPU variant features a top-of-the-line 6P+8E core configuration. Intel is solely responsible for fabrication of an IOE (I/O) tile (the company's own term for a chiplet) with PCIe 5.0 plus Thunderbolt 4, as well as an SoC tile. The GPU part of the design is rumored to be based on their own Arc Alchemist architecture, and TSMC has been contracted to manufacture this graphics tile - not a big surprise since Intel has also placed substantial manufacturing orders for discrete Arc cards with the Taiwanese foundry.
35 Comments on Intel 14th Gen Core Lineup Confirmed to be Meteor Lake CPU Range
The Xe version numbers are confusing.
The 11-12-13th gen iGPUs are:
Internal code DG1, Xe-LP, "0th gen ARC", dGPU is named Xe MAX.
The 14th gen iGPU is.
Internal code DG2, Xe-LPG, 1st gen ARC, dGPU is namedAlchemist.
The Lunar lake iGPU is:
Internal code DG3, Xe2-LPG, 2nd gen ARC, dGPU is named Battlemage.
What I mean is, I don't know about any architectural difference between Xe-LP and Xe-LPG apart from RT and XMX. The rest of the chip is a scaled-up version of Xe-LP, isn't it?
- Now supports RT.
- Unslice is updated, e.g. now it handles AV1 format.
- 1.5-2.0x performance is expected at the same power due to 1.3x EU count and higher clocks with the better node.
To me, I am less optimistic about Meteor Lake because the way that Intel is limiting this only to laptop kind of sound similar to the failed Cannon and Ice Lake processors. It is mentioned that Meteor Lake is limited to mobile/ laptop. So if you are looking for a desktop version, then I think you may be disappointed. The other red flag is the regression in number of P-cores. Intel when releasing Alder and Raptor Lake is clearly aware that 8 P-cores is the sweet spot, and they can “fortify” their multithreaded performance through the spamming of E-cores. But yet the number of P-cores regressed. Perhaps they are trying to limit power draw for the mobile space, but considering existing Raptor Lake mobile processors are drawing record amount of power for a laptop, it is surprising why Intel will bother about dropping core count to “keep power in check”. Unless there is a real power or density crisis with their 7nm that is forcing them to take this design approach. It is all my speculation, but I think we will know soon.
Comparing the same 6-core 11400H⁑ (10nm Super Fin) and 12400⁂ (Intel 7), the iso-power clock is improved by about 10-15%, and including the IPC difference (18%), the latter has 30 % better performance.
Comparing 12900K⁂ and 13700K⁂ with the same 8P+8E configuration, the iso-power performance is improved by 10%.
Ice lake's 10nm and Raptor lake's Intel 7 have improved the iso-power clock by about 35%. It corresponds to the 1.5th generation progress (roughly equivalent to the performance difference between N7 and N4), considering that the iso-power clock improvement for an average node generation is around 20%. Strictly speaking, the initial 10nm was too unfinished.
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