Meteor Lake
Meteor Lake is the codename for Core Ultra Series 1 mobile processors, designed by Intel[3] and officially released on December 14, 2023.
[7] 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.
[8] In April 2022, Intel announced that an assembled Meteor Lake mobile processor had been powered-on for the first time in a development milestone.
[9][10] In March 2023, it was reported that Intel had decided to cancel development of high-end Meteor Lake-S processors for desktop.
[21] 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".
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.
It is the first Intel microarchitecture to utilize a disaggregated multi-chip module (MCM) approach rather than using large monolithic silicon dies.
Previously, in June 2017, Intel had derided AMD's disaggregated chiplet approach in their Ryzen and Epyc processors as using "glued-together" dies.
As a result of greater yields, the use of multiple pre-tested components in an MCM removes the need for binning an entire assembled CPU as is the case with monolithic dies.
Due to its MCM construction, Meteor Lake can take advantage of different process nodes that are best suited to the use case.
Meteor Lake's CPU compute tile features up to 6 Redwood Cove P-cores and 8 Crestmont E-cores.
This 128 XVE configuration is a downgrade from the 192 XVEs Intel originally showed for Meteor Lake's graphics in a July 2021 presentation slide.
The lack of XMX units means that the Xe-LPG core instead uses DP4a instructions in line with Microsoft Shader Model 6.4.
Intel claims that Meteor Lake's GPU can "run at a much lower minimum voltage" and hit boost clock speeds of over 2.0 GHz.
[46] There is full support included for the DirectX 12 Ultimate graphics API and Intel's XeSS upscaler, an alternative to Nvidia's DLSS and AMD's FSR.
Intel demonstrated Dying Light 2 running on Meteor Lake's integrated graphics at 1080p with XeSS performance mode upscaling from 720p.
[47] A hardware listing from Dell confirmed that in order to fully make use of the integrated Arc graphics, the system must be configured with at least 16GB of memory running in dual-channel mode.
This enables greater power efficiency as the GPU tile is not always active while the system is at idle or under light loads like video playback.
[52] Meteor Lake features a Neural Processing Unit (NPU) to provide integrated AI capabilities.
[55][56] Meteor Lake's NPU, which is marketed as Intel AI Boost, uses two Movidius 32-bit LEON microcontrollers called 'LeonRT' for processing host commands and 'LeonNN' for low level hardware scheduling.
[58] Meteor Lake's NPU allows AI acceleration and neural processing like Stable Diffusion to be done locally, on silicon rather than in the cloud.
[59] The benefit of running such functions locally is that it provides greater privacy and does not require an internet connection or paying a fee to a third party for using their server computing power.
[62] It provides scalable I/O blocks, which is primarily to offer additional connectivity to that of the SoC tile, such as PCIe 5.0 lanes.
By contrast, AMD's chiplet approach uses multiple pieces of silicon that are interconnected via traces on the package substrate.
AMD's Infinity Fabric approach comes with the drawbacks of increased latency and using additional power for die-to-die communication at around 1.5 picojoules per bit.
[37] Intel's communication via a silicon interposer uses less power, at around 0.3 picojoules per bit, but is more expensive to produce, is less scalable and packaging is more complex.
