Meteor Lake

In July 2021, Meteor Lake was initially announced to be coming with a 5–125W TDP range for various segments ranging from ultra low power mobile to enthusiast desktop.^[7] The initial tape-in process for Meteor Lake took place in May 2021. The CPU compute tile was confirmed to be fabricated on Intel's 7nm process (since rebranded to "Intel 4").^[8][9]

In October 2021, Intel said in an earnings call that it had taped out the CPU compute tile for Meteor Lake and after it was received it had powered on within 30 minutes and with expected performance levels.^[10] In April 2022, Intel announced that an assembled Meteor Lake mobile processor had been powered-on for the first time in a development milestone.^[11][12]

In March 2023, it was reported that Intel had decided to cancel development of high-end Meteor Lake-S processors for desktop.^[13] Meteor Lake-S processors were being designed to fit into the LGA 1851 socket, which is identical in dimensions to LGA 1700, but the cancellation of desktop Meteor Lake meant that the LGA 1851 socket won't debut until Arrow Lake in 2024.^[14] The top Meteor Lake-S SKU in development contained 6 Redwood Cove P-cores and 16 Crestmont E-cores, which is two fewer P-cores than the last generation Raptor Lake Core i9-13900K.

At Intel's Innovation event in September 2023, head of Intel's Client Computing Group Michelle Johnston Holthaus confirmed that some Meteor Lake-based processors would come to desktop in 2024. Intel later clarified that socketable desktop Meteor Lake processors would not be coming to the DIY market with the LGA 1851 socket.^[15][16] Instead, Meteor Lake processors in a BGA package will be available on desktop in the form of compact all-in-one PCs.^[17] A reason for this, according to a statement by Intel to ComputerBase, is that "Meteor Lake is a power efficient architecture that will power innovative mobile and desktop designs".^[18]

Branding

Intel unveiled new branding in June 2023 for upcoming Meteor Lake processors after 15 years of using the same Core i branding. Core branding would be simplified by dropping the 'i' with processors branded Core 3, 5 and 7 instead.^[19] The new 'Core Ultra' 5, 7 and 9 branding would be reserved for "premium" processors according to Intel.^[20] In addition to the new tier naming, Intel said it would be de-emphasizing processor generations in marketing material, though the processor generation number would remain in the processor number.^[21] Meteor Lake processors with Core Ultra branding are classified as first generation Core Ultra.

The new Core and Core Ultra branding was perceived as creating more branding confusion rather than reducing it.^[22] Josh Loeffler of TechRadar wrote that "differentiation between Core and Core Ultra is also somewhat head-scratching, especially since there will at least be some overlap between the two brands" as Core 5 and Core 7 processors will exist alongside Core Ultra 5 and Core Ultra 7 processors.^[23] In the view of Digital Trends, the new branding emulated AMD and Apple's naming conventions which amounted to Intel "chasing its competitors instead of leading the pack".^[24]

Intel Core branding (2020–2023)

Core i3

Core i5

Core i7

Core i9

Intel Core and Core Ultra branding (since 2023)

Core 3

Core 5

Core 7

Core Ultra 5

Core Ultra 7

Core Ultra 9

Production

In April 2023, Meteor Lake and its "Intel 4" process were reportedly ramping to production.^[25] Production on Meteor Lake with Intel 4 wafers took place at Intel's D1D fabrication facility in Hillsboro, Oregon.^[26] The D1D fabrication facility has a total output of 40,000 wafers a month.^[27] Secondary source production for Meteor Lake takes place at Fab 34 in the Republic of Ireland.^[28][29] On September 29, 2023, Intel announced that Intel 4 products, including Meteor Lake, had entered high-volume production at Fab 34 in the Republic of Ireland.^[30] The GPU, SoC and I/O extender tiles in Meteor Lake are manufactured by TSMC in Taiwan.

Unveiling and release

Meteor Lake was revealed at Intel's Innovation event on September 19, 2023 with the announcement that 'Core Ultra' branded processors would be launching on December 14.^[31] However, no list of Meteor Lake SKUs were revealed at Innovation nor release details on regular 'Core' branded processors.^[32]

According to Intel Technology Roadmaps and Milestones published on February 17, 2022. Meteor Lake features XPU (Intel's device abstraction for CPU, GPU, FPGA and other accelerators) enhancements with integrated AI and a tiled GPU architecture that, according to Intel, should deliver discrete graphics-level performance.^[3] These statements were later confirmed on May 23, 2023, with additional details that emphasized Intel's collaboration with Microsoft on support of the new processor in Windows 11.^[33]

Intel uses several lithographic processes in the Meteor Lake processors.^[34] The compute tile is manufactured using the Intel 4 process, the graphics tile TSMC's N5 process, the SoC and I/O tiles TSMC's N6 process. The tiles are connected by Intel's Foveros^[4] packaging technology.^[35]

A chiplet architecture with four tiles: compute, graphics, system on a chip and input/output.^[4][36] Whereas a discrete Platform Controller Hub (PCH) chip was included in the package of previous generations of high-end laptop processors to provide I/O functions, those are integrated into the processor MCM itself for Meteor Lake.^[37] It comes in a Type 3 FC-BGA2049 package.

CPU

• Up to 16 cores:^[38]
  • Up to 6 Redwood Cove performance cores (P-core)
  • 8 Crestmont efficient cores (E-core), 2 clusters with 4 cores
  • 2 low power Crestmont efficient cores (LP E-core) on the SoC tile
• L1 instruction cache per P-core increased to 64 KB, up from 32 KB in Raptor Cove
• 2 MB L2 cache for each P-core, E-core cluster and LP E-core cluster
• Up to 24 MB shared L3 cache
• Increased power efficiency

GPU

• Xe-LPG architecture^[39][40]
• Up to 8 Xe cores and 128 Xe Vector Engines (XVEs)^[41]
  • 16 XVEs per Xe core
• 8K 10-bit AV1 hardware encoder^[42][43]
• Up to 2.35 GHz frequency^[4]
• FP64 native hardware support^[4]

NPU

• Intel AI Boost NPU accelerator up to 1.4 GHz frequency^[44]
• 4K MAC with each MAC capable of 1 fp16 or 2 int8 operations per cycle
  • 11 TOPS NPU performance
  • 34 TOPS combined AI performance (5 TOPS CPU + 18 TOPS GPU)^[45]
• 4 digital signal processors
• 4 MB dedicated static memory
• LeonRT front-end processor
• Support APIs like DirectML, OpenGL, OpenVX and Vulkan

I/O

• up to 96 GB DDR5-5600 and LPDDR5X-7467 memory
  • Support for DDR4 and LPDDR4X memory was dropped
• up to 8 PCI Express 5.0 lanes and 20 PCI Express 4.0 lanes on H-series processors, up to 20 PCI Express 4.0 lanes on U-series processors
• 8 Direct Media Interface 4.0 lanes
• 4 Thunderbolt 4.0 ports
• Wi-Fi 6E support^[46]
• DisplayPort 2.1 native support^[42]
• HDMI 2.1 48Gbit/s native support^[42][47]

Mobile processors

Meteor Lake-H

155H, 165H, and 185H support P-core Turbo Boost 3.0 running at the same frequency as Turbo Boost 2.0.

Meteor Lake-U

Meteor Lake-U series' tile GPU is branded as "Intel Graphics" but still use the same GPU microarchitecture as "Intel Arc Graphics" on Meteor Lake-H series.

Embedded processors

Meteor Lake-PS

• Redwood Cove (microarchitecture)
• Crestmont (microarchitecture)
• Granite Rapids, the 6th generation Xeon Scalable and Xeon W family
• Intel Core
• List of Intel CPU microarchitectures