CNET's first look at the 2023 Intel Meteor Lake mobile processors reveals mysterious fourth tile

CNET recently published detailed photos depicting some of Intel’s upcoming processors that are produced at Fab 42 in Chandler, Arizona. The article features chips like the Sapphire Rapids server processors and the Ponte Vecchio compute GPUs, which are expected to launch next year, but there also are depictions of an entire wafer of test chips for the Meteor Lake 14th gen processors that should launch in 2023 according to the latest leaked roadmaps.

The 300 mm wafer is studded with hundreds of Meteor Lake processors that are said to use the second generation Intel Foveros 3D packaging, which is currently tested for integrity purposes. Videocardz is suggesting that these test chips may belong to the Meteor Lake-M series with TDPs ranging between 5 and 15 W meant to power thin and light notebooks. Intel’s official slides also mention that Meteor Lake will feature a 36 micron bump pitch Foveros package integrating a compute tile, SoC-LP I/O tile and GPU tile with 96 to 192 cores. However, the CNET images reveal a fourth smaller tile above the GPU. This could be used to add more GPU cores, or it could be a totally different tile with a purpose that will be unveiled closer to launch date.

Our preliminary tests show that the laptop-grade Alder Lake-P processors deliver impressive performance gains over AMD’s Zen 3 mobile APUs. While the 2022 Raptor Lake successor will only bring refinements to the Alder Lake design, Meteor Lake with its first true multi-tile consumer chips could boost the performance of a 15 W M-series to almost match that of a 45 W Alder Lake-P model.

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