Intel "Q46W" Engineering Sample Seems to be "Meteor Lake-S" Desktop CPU minus Hyper-Threading

[T0@st]

The status of Intel "Meteor Lake-S" (MTL-S) desktop processors was the subject of much speculation throughout 2023—by September of that year, Team Blue leadership projected an upcoming launch in 2024. Technically, Meteor Lake was deployed to "sort-of desktops" platforms—albeit in mini-PCs that utilized Core Ultra mobile chips. Industry moles insisted that Intel was still actively engaged in production of MTL-S samples in late 2023. According to a recent ITHome report, those insider tales turned out to be legitimate. On Monday (March 24), the online publication revealed the existence of a mysterious "Q46W" engineering sample—courtesy of Kyoka (a trusted source). A CPU-Z diagnostic revealed the unannounced CPU's turboboost capability reaching 4.5 GHz, while base frequency sat at the 2.8 GHz mark.

According to ITHome's investigative piece, Team Blue: "tested a very special desktop processor: it uses the Meteor Lake architecture, has 6 performance cores and 8 energy efficiency cores (6P+8E), but the performance cores (P-cores) do not support Hyper-Threading. The production date of the product in hand is the 51st week of 2023, which is obviously later than the time when Meteor Lake-S was reported to be cancelled for external sales. From this situation, 'Q46W' may be a development test processor for FCLGA1851 platform or the 800 series chipset. Kyoka believes that the processor should be in the ES2 stage." A Xianyu seller—tbNick_3u8k4—is reportedly offloading a surprising quantity of "Intel Confidential Q46W" processors, allegedly manufactured back in early 2024. Photos show tray-mounted units available for sale on Taobao's second hand market platform. tbNick_3u8k4 mentions that this particular batch of Q46W chips "requires a special motherboard to light up," suggesting that readily available Intel 800 Series chipset-based models are not fit for purpose.



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[Fouquin]

Okay so it's Meteor Lake-PS with HT disabled.

 

[NoLoihi]

I welcome the notion that Intel hasn’t willfully misled the public. Some people might shut up with their conspiracy rhetoric. (I’d wish!) There’s not much else to say … [Thanks for letting us know!]

 

[ZoneDymo]

I welcome the notion that Intel hasn’t willfully misled the public. Some people might shut up with their conspiracy rhetoric. (I’d wish!) There’s not much else to say … [Thanks for letting us know!]

But what about Gelsinger's laptops? And Su's emails?!?

 

[efikkan]

If this wasn't identified as "Meteor Lake-S" I would have guessed it was an early test chip for Arrow Lake, as 1) it lacks SMT, 2) is LGA1851, 3) fits perfectly with the timeline for Arrow Lake (Pat showed a wafer of Arrow Lake test dies in September 2023) and this apparently was made in week 51 of 2023, meanwhile the timeline for Meteor Lake doesn't fit; allegedly cancelled Meteor Lake-S before March 2023, while Meteor Lake was running engineering samples in April 2022. So, is this an older design they chose to assemble for testing purposes, or just some experimental design never intended for mass production?

It would be interesting to see a dump from all flags from CPUID (e.g. /proc/cpuinfo in Linux), as the flags would probably help confirm the CPU architecture.

Okay so it's Meteor Lake-PS with HT disabled.

The CPUID of Meteor Lake-PS along with -U and -H is A06A4, meanwhile this CPU is A06C1.
(For comparison production models of Arrow Lake are B0650/C0652/C0662.)
These numbers doesn't necessarily indicate family relationships between chips, but rather a sort-of incremental number of the design.