Efficient Intel Meteor Lake described as "Zen 4 Phoenix Killer" as leak claims Intel is working on a 40-core Arrow Lake CPU

We previously reported that Intel may have canceled the desktop Meteor Lake processors altogether and the company could only release the Meteor Lake chips for laptops. Come Computex, we saw MSI reveal the Prestige 16 laptop running a 22-thread MTL processor. Later, a preliminary Cinebench R23 benchmark result for the Meteor Lake chip inside the MSI Prestige 16 notebook came out. In addition to revealing new details about the upcoming Meteor Lake and Arrow Lake CPUs, Tom from Moore’s Law Is Dead has also confirmed that MTL-S processors are indeed canceled.

Intel Meteor Lake

In his newest video, Tom alleges that MTL-S, which was expected to use the LGA1851 socket, has been canned. So, we will only see MTL on notebooks. The leaker also reports that Meteor Lake has two little “hidden Crestmont cores” on the processor’s SoC die allowing users to disable the CPU tile for “massive idle Power savings” while preserving chip-to-chip communications.

Interestingly, Tom can’t confirm if applications can employ all 16 cores (6 P-cores + 8 E-cores + 2 SoC Crestmont cores) in their entirety as the two small cores are mainly for “idle power savings and Chipset I/O communication”.

When it comes to performance, the leaker reports that the MTL is expected to go head-to-head and win against AMD’s Zen 4 Phoenix processors rather than the upcoming Zen 5 Strix CPUs. Previous leaks have alleged that the P-cores on the Intel Meteor Lake CPUs could bring just a single-digit IPC uplift over the Raptor Lake P-cores.

That said, MTL CPUs are expected to be highly efficient as MLID suggests that the chips will compete with the Zen 5 Strix processors in this regard.

Intel Arrow Lake

Per MLID’s latest report, Intel Arrow Lake processors will release sometime in Q4 2024. What’s surprising, however, is that Team Blue might be re-developing the 40-core (8 P-cores + 32 E-cores) configuration. For context, past leaks have alleged that the ARL CPUs top out at 24 cores ( 8 P-cores + 16 E-cores).

Furthermore, Arrow Lake performance figures could land at 30-40% higher single-threaded performance vs the 13th gen Raptor Lake CPUs. The leaker also estimates that, per a benchmark comparison of a 14-core (6 P-cores + 8-cores) ARL chip vs a 14-core MTL chip that had the ARL CPU outperforming the MTL CPU by 40% in multi-threaded workloads, the top 40-core ARL SKU could beat the 24-core Raptor Lake flagship by a whopping 55-75% in multi-threading performance.

Moving on, Tom suggests that Intel is contracting TSMC to produce the 40-core ARL desktop Core i9, 24-core (8 + 16) Core i7 for desktop, and 14-core (8 + 6) laptop Core i5/i7 SKUs using the 3 nm process. The desktop 14-core Core i3/i5 ARL-S and the 10-core laptop Core i3 are expected to be using the Intel 20A process.

Finally, the leaker also reports that Arrow Lake’s iGPU is getting downgraded to 192 Celestial Execution Units as the “320 EU iGPU tile isn’t standard anymore”.

With MLID’s information regarding Intel Meteor Lake and Arrow Lake out of the way, we would be remiss if we didn’t mention that OneRaichu, another serial leaker, has described MLID’s latest report as “outdated, false” and containing few accurate details. So, whether MLID’s report is accurate to a high degree or contains false information as Raichu claims, it is pertinent to take the leak with a giant grain of salt.

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