Meteor Lake

Meteor Lake is Intel's 14th-generation processor architecture, first announced in 2021 and expected to be released in 2023. Upon announcing the Meteor Lake generation, Intel confirmed they will be the first chips to use a new, smaller node, manufactured with the company’s 7nm process as well as ultraviolet lithography, or EUV, using a rearchitected, simplified process flow.

Rumors suggest that in October 2023, Meteor Lake chips will begin rolling out with a 14-core laptop CPU rather than a desktop processor. Reports claim shipping of the Intel Meteor Lake-S desktop range might be canceled, with the company instead releasing a refresh of Raptor Lake and either pushing back Meteor Lake desktop chips to 2024 or scrapping them entirely, skipping straight to Arrow Lake (15th generation) for its desktop chips. In April 2023, Hardware Times released a leaked Intel slide that appears to confirm the rumors of Meteor Lake for desktops being canceled. The roadmap shows no mention of Meteor Lake with a planned launch of Raptor Lake-S processors in 2023.

Rumoured Intel roadmap without a Meteor Lake Desktop release in 2023 or 2024 Q4.

At Intel's 2022 Investor Day, the company confirmed Meteor Lake and Arrow Lake are moving to the Intel 4 process technology, a shift to a 7nm process. In addition to the main compute die, Meteor Lake has separate GPU, IO, and system-on-a-chip (SoC) dies. This is enabled by Intel Foveros, a multi-die packaging technology the company has been developing.

Diagram of the Meteor Lake package.

Intel is said to be using new Redwood Cove cores for performance and Crestmont cores for efficiency. As in previous generations, Intel is combining two different core types in the compute die in order to provide large numbers of cores without the increased power draw associated with them. The Crestmont cores are said to have up to 15% improvement in instructions per cycle (IPC) compared to last-gen Gracemont, and Redwood Cove may offer as much as a 25% IPC uplift compared to Raptor Cove. Intel is using its Arc GPU architecture for the graphics tile, although it is unclear if that tile will use current-gen Arc Alchemist or next-gen Arc Battlemage.

Intel has confirmed they are working with Microsoft to drive the development of artificial intelligence (AI) on personal computing. At Microsoft’s Build 2023 conference, Intel and Microsoft previewed the AI-enabled capabilities of the Meteor Lake client PC processors. Utilizing disaggregated architecture, Intel and Microsoft plan to enable new AI-powered features for PC users—including multimedia features like auto reframe and scene edit detection in Adobe Premiere Pro and more effective machine learning. Meteor Lake is the first PC platform from Intel featuring a built-in neural vision processing unit (VPU), a dedicated AI engine directly on the SoC to power efficiently run AI models.

While Intel has not released many other details about the Meteor Lake specifications, a leak from July 2022 provided loose information about the mobile processors. This includes three variations of the mobile chip U, P, and H that typically have a power consumption of 15, 28, and 45 watts, respectively. The leak also showed mobile Meteor Lake chips will have a maximum of 14 cores split across six performance cores and eight efficient cores. The generation will also support DDR5 and LPDDR5, as well as PCIe 5.0, which are all platform features Intel currently supports.

Intel confirmed Meteor Lake CPUs will carry new branding, moving on from the company's “i” naming, which it has used since 2008, and replacing it with “Core Ultra” branding. Intel's Director of Communications, Bernard Fernandes, explained the decision in a May 1, 2023, tweet:

Yes, we are making brand changes as we’re at an inflection point in our client roadmap in preparation for the upcoming launch of our #MeteorLake processors. We will provide more details regarding these exciting changes in the coming weeks!