Tuesday, April 25th 2023
Intel Meteor Lake Desktop CPUs Spotted in Presentation, Leak Indicates Core i3 and i5 Only
Following on from yesterday's news of Meteor Lake's "Adamantine" L4 cache another leaky bit of information has popped up. A tipster on Twitter, Bionic_squash, has uploaded a slide from a supposedly official Intel presentation document, and it shows a small selection of Meteor Lake-S and Arrow Lake-S desktop CPUs, as well as the refreshed Raptor Lake-S series. The majority of recent leaks have pointed to laptop variants of Intel's fourteenth generation Core lineup, and not much has emerged about a desktop-dedicated range in a while - prompting further murmurs about Team Blue canning that side of things. The Meteor Lake-S family is still in the works according to the leaked chart and industry experts reckon that a product launch is due later in the year.
By looking closely at the chart, it shows that the Meteor Lake-S desktop processors are limited to 35 and 65 W TDPs, meaning that Core i3 and i5 lines are the only offerings within the 14th generation desktop lineup. Performance enthusiasts will need to look at the 15th gen Arrow Lake-S lineup - where the big i7 and i9 CPUs (up to 125 W) sit, or the refreshed Raptor Lake lineup which also offers a wide range of options - from i3 up to i9. Industry experts are a bit puzzled about Meteor Lake's prospects in the desktop processor sector - when considering a (speculated) skew to more entry-level and mid-range minded customers. Will Intel lose out by not offering more powerful variants, or are they working on a refreshed 14th generation product lineup for 2025?
Sources:
Tom's Hardware, SquashBionic Tweet
By looking closely at the chart, it shows that the Meteor Lake-S desktop processors are limited to 35 and 65 W TDPs, meaning that Core i3 and i5 lines are the only offerings within the 14th generation desktop lineup. Performance enthusiasts will need to look at the 15th gen Arrow Lake-S lineup - where the big i7 and i9 CPUs (up to 125 W) sit, or the refreshed Raptor Lake lineup which also offers a wide range of options - from i3 up to i9. Industry experts are a bit puzzled about Meteor Lake's prospects in the desktop processor sector - when considering a (speculated) skew to more entry-level and mid-range minded customers. Will Intel lose out by not offering more powerful variants, or are they working on a refreshed 14th generation product lineup for 2025?
27 Comments on Intel Meteor Lake Desktop CPUs Spotted in Presentation, Leak Indicates Core i3 and i5 Only
Well, lets see performance, but weird to see only up to i5. Maybe by going i5 they do not want to overcome current i7?
What’s going on?
Both lakes have different core generation designs, and process nodes so the question is, will arrow lake-a launch along side meteor lake-s?
But I waited for this long. the angstrom era is just around the corner.
I just hope we see real progress on performance per watt and massive power reductions in MT applications.Arrow Lake is essentially a refined version of ML, it's not fundammentally a different design or architecure. It leverages a refined process node, and improved P and E cores and probably higher clocks. Meteor Lake is a radical shift in design and is proving difficult to get right. Meteor Lake is a year late. Don't forget ML is not only new process node, it uses chiplets and a Foveros FPGA interposer.
I would wait for Arrow Lake no matter how good Meteor Lake would be. I'm not buying into beta designs.
What can be predicted with some certainty about Meteor lake:
- Power consumption at the same clock will be 2/3 compared to Intel 7 (data also shown at IEDM2022).
- The maximum clock is about the same or slightly lower than RPL.
- Technologies that reduce power consumption by 20% at low to medium loads, such as DLVR, will be introduced.
- IPC is only slightly higher than RPL.
Simply put, '14600' (best-binned MTL 6+8 die) will be '13600K with 2/3 the power consumption'. As a result, it will have
- ST performance similar to 13900K, 7800X3D +20%.
- MT performance similar to 13600K (PL2 unlimited), 7800X3D +40%.
- Gaming performance similar to 13900K and 7800X3D, more better if ADM cache works
- Maximum power consumption ranges 105-120W
- Power efficiency similar to 7800X3D, 10W lower idle
This is why Meteorlake-S is low end.No, in terms of performance gains and architecture, Arrowlake is the big one. While the Redwood Cove cores in Meteorlake get maybe 5% per clock, Lion Cove cores in Arrowlake is expanding it greatly. Going from 6 to 8 decoders, and 700+ Reorder buffers.You'll be very disappointed if that's what you are expecting for Meteorlake. Rather than just parroting tech sites that you criticize(and you are right), go and actually read Intel 4 coverage. The gains in perf/clock and perf/watt drops when the clock frequency goes near 4GHz. 20% clock gain at same power about 3.5GHz drops to only 10-12% at 4GHz.
At 5+GHz the desktop parts play at, you are essentially seeing no gain. And how can ST be 20% faster when the uarch is a minor update and it's not power limited anyway?
5% ST gain, 10% MT gain, in the optimistic scenario. Arrowlake is the big one, but Meteorlake is only slightly better than a refresh.
- If Semianalysis' "Meteor Lake Die Shot and Architecture Analysis" is correct, there is little difference between MTL and RPL in IPC.
- If the story posted by AnandTech in summer 2021 is correct, the E-core of Arrow lake will be "Skymont", and according to OneRaichu, a certain IPC improvement (around 20%) can be expected with Skymont.
- Intel 7 and Intel 4, both FinFET, have similar design limitations and can be easily adapted. On the other hand, 20A will introduce RibbonFET and PowerVIA, which will significantly change the design rules, making some changes to the microarchitecture inevitable.
- RibbonFETs enable faster switching and PowerVIA have better high-frequency tolerance; 20A is expected to have a clock improvement of about 15% at the same power consumption.
E-cores on the other hand I expect different. Skymont is probably 30% per clock faster than Crestmont(Meteorlake).
The Sapphire Rapids development team was interviewed by the New York Times in January of this year, and it seems that there is an awareness within the company that the new design challenges associated with tiling are increasing. They said that if the product lineup is not narrowed down, the design capacity will be exceeded. This is probably the reason why MTL-S was reduced to 6+8 dies in common with MTL-P.
Hell must freeze over before I buy anything Intel high end these days. I totally get why they stop at i5. Anything over it is a total waste of time and most of all energy.
On the gaming front they have absolutely nothing to combat X3D either. At best they reach performance parity while using triple the energy, but most of the time even that isn't possible.They are efficient but the performance ceiling at which they're still efficient is not nearly as close to topping charts as they would like.
From this figure, it is sufficient to know that power consumption at the same frequency decreases by about 50-30% in most ranges. This is the only official data I have some confidence in. If you have other sources, please let me know.I apologize for the confusing writing style here. I wanted to write, "ST perf will be the same as the 13900K, which means it will be 20% faster than the 7800X3D."
But if you actually set aside extreme multithreaded scenarios and go for mixed workloads, intel knocks it out of the park, it's not even a contest. Of course that is because of the monolithic design, but the details don't really matter to the end user. My actual daily work requires lots of browsers excel sheets and the likes, multiple tasks but not heavily threaded. Intel cpus handle that at 6 to 12w, while zen 4 need 40+. That is one huge gap right there.
Gaming is the only scenario right now that Raptorlake suffers compared to the 3d parts in terms of efficiency. It's terrible, but thankfully you can always opt for an alder lake cpu just like I did