Intel 4 Process Node

With "Meteor Lake," Intel is debuting the Intel 4 process node. A generational upgrade over Intel 7, which the company had claimed to offer comparable transistor densities to TSMC's 7 nm-class nodes, the new Intel 4 node competes with TSMC's 5 nm-class nodes.


Intel 4 incorporates extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography. It offers double the area scaling for logic libraries compared to Intel 7, and over 20% iso-power performance compared to the older node. The node also introduces the new high-density metal-insulator-metal capacitor.

Foveros Packaging

Intel is using its new generation Foveros packaging technology. This is the key ingredient to get such a highly disaggregated device like "Meteor Lake" to work. The four tiles on the processor need high-density microscopic wiring to run between them, with much tighter power requirements than the package of an HPC device such as "Ponte Vecchio."


The four tiles of "Meteor Lake" are bonded to a fifth tile called the base tile. This is essentially an interposer—a silicon die that does little more than facilitate high-density microscopic wiring between dies stacked on top of it—but with some added logic function.


Packaging "Meteor Lake" isn't as easy as it is on the monolithic "Raptor Lake" that simply needs to be bumped and packaged directly onto the substrate. At a facility located in Malaysia, the Compute, Graphics, SoC, and I/O tiles are sourced from their respective foundries, individually tested, sorted by grade, and then assembled onto the base tile, which has a pre-set configuration of inter-tile wiring specific to the desired processor SKU. This base tile has 36-micron bump pitches to interface with the tiles above, interposer interconnects less than 1 micron in size, trace-lengths under 2 mm, and bandwidths of up to 160 GB/s per mm, with an energy efficiency of under 0.3 picojoules per bit. The other side (underside) of the base tile has traditional bumps that interface with the fiberglass substrate. There is an additional battery of tests and quality control for the fully assembled SoC with all its tiles in place.

What's Next for Meteor Lake? Can I see the products?

Intel has not shared any information on the individual Core processor SKUs based on "Meteor Lake." We know from previous Intel announcements that the company is undertaking a major change in the way it brands its Core processor SKUs, including the introduction of the Core Ultra brand designating the latest microarchitecture. Intel's nomenclature will no longer include the generational string (eg: 12th Gen Core), since the generation is already part of the model number. Next up, the brand extension "i" is about to be dropped. Core i7, for example, will become simply Core 7.

If we were to apply the new naming scheme on the "15th Gen Intel Core i7-15900," for example, it would be called simply "Intel Core 7-15900." Intel is also introducing the new Core Ultra brand. This was probably done to deal with the overlap of a significantly newer architecture with an older architecture already being in the market, wherein Intel wouldn't want to retire the older architecture. Toward late 2023 or early 2024, Intel will be faced with having to market both processors based on the "Raptor Lake" architecture (which is rumored to be getting a major product-stack refresh in 2H-2023), and the upcoming "Meteor Lake" architecture.

We gather from Intel's presentation that the maximum hardware configuration possible for "Meteor Lake" sees a CPU with 6 P-cores, two E-core clusters, and an iGPU with 8 Xe Cores (worth 128 EU or 1,024 unified shaders). Besides these the processor has a PCIe Gen 5 root complex, Thunderbolt 5 (up to 120 Gbps per direction); USB4, and other modern interfaces.

Intel plans to debut "Meteor Lake" in Q4-2023 beginning exclusively on the mobile platform, since we have only seen references to mobile packages throughout the presentation. It remains to be seen if Intel brings "Meteor Lake" to the desktop, as part of its future LGA1851 package.

Advanced Packaging Full Presentation

Intel 4 Process Full Presentation