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MagyarIntel reveals Meteor Lake: Core Ultra bets on efficiency, AI, a new iGPU, Intel 4 - and TSMC
In the last five years, Intel had to witness the competition stealing the thunder of the once clear CPU market leader. First, AMD released its Ryzen series, threatening Intel's dominant position in the x86 market. And then, the former Intel-customer Apple mutinied, releasing their own ARM based M series processors for the Mac computers, which still are the benchmark when it comes to efficiency.
Many of the triumphs of the competition were due to the fact that Intel's own foundry, once the reason for its supremacy, suddenly became a weakness. Intel already had problems moving to the 14 nm process, and the following 10 nm process, which Intel still uses for Raptor Lake as "Intel 7", came out years late. In this time, especially the Taiwanese foundry TSMC eclipsed Intel, as TSMC placed a successful early bet on EUV lithography, unlike Intel.
Intel Meteor Lake: Breaking with the tradition
In this sense, the coming CPU platform Meteor Lake, which will be marketed as Core Ultra, is a big change for Intel. It will be both the first platform to use the new "Intel 4" process, which is the first Intel process based on EUV, and the first Intel Client CPU platform where Intel utilizes another foundry - namely TSMC - to make parts of the SoC.
This is possible, because Meteor Lake is a "disaggregated" design, unlike its monolithic predecessors, where wafer chips from different sources are fused into one whole - through the "Foveros" process. Intel calls the different components "Tiles", only the Compute Tile uses the "Intel 4" process.
Meteor Lake, a tick: Redwood Cove and Crestmont are updates
The CPU cores live in said Compute tile - mostly. The maximum core count of Meteor Lake: Six Redwood cove P cores and eight Crestmont E cores. Redwood Cove and Crestmont are not completely new, they are updates of Raptor Cove and Gracemont made in the new Intel 4 process. Following Intel's old tick-tock-model, Meteor Lake is a tick - old architecture, new process - that is based on Alder Lake and Raptor Lake.
Efficiency is the goal: Low power E cores as key feature of Meteor Lake
In Meteor Lake's case, the rest of the SoC is more important than the CPU cores them self. Intel correctly identified efficiency as the big deficiency of Alder Lake and Raptor Lake. To increase efficiency, Intel is not just banking on the new process. Intel has changed the design to make it possible to disable the Compute tile completely in the right condition.
This power saving feature is possible, because Intel has put processor cores outside of the Compute tile for the first time: In the so called SoC tile, Intel placed two additional Crestmont cores, the "Low power E cores". These low power cores are meant for background tasks and low load situations, in which the Compute tile can simply be turned off. Accordingly, the power usage of Meteor Lake in such a situation should be far lower than Alder Lake or Raptor Lake.
Intel makes a similar move in regards to the GPU tile: With the preceding design, the Media engine and Display engine were both part of the GPU. With Meteor Lake, they are also part of the SoC tile. Intel had to significantly redesign the memory connections to make it possible to disable all of these components separately. Also, the Intel Thread Director, which handles the scheduling of the CPU, has been completely redesigned as well.
New iGPU with 128 EUs based on Intel ARC
When it comes to the integrated graphics chip, Meteor Lake includes the first update since 2021's Tiger Lake. The "Graphics tile", which Intel calls "Xe LPG", is based on Intel ARC. Compared to the preceding Iris Xe LP solution, the maximum amount of Executive Units (EUs) has been increased from 96 to 128. Overall, Intel promises twice as much "Performance per Watt" compared with Tiger Lake (with the i7-1185G7 as the comparison here). Completely new for Meteor Lake: Eight Ray tracing units and Intel XeSS, Intels AI upscaling solution like Nvidia's DLSS.
AI engine, WiFi 7, PCIe Gen 5 - Intel modernizes the platform
Completely new in Meteor Lake is the Neural / AI engine (NPU), which is meant to make on-device AI computation more efficient.
Additionally, Meteor Lake will support many new standards. This includes PCIe Gen 5 as well as WiFi 7, for which Intel has introduced the new BE200 WiFi module.
Verdict: Meteor Lake as a step into Intel's future
Clearly, Meteor Lake will not break any performance records, at least when it comes to the CPU performance. With the focus on efficiency, we think Intel has made the right decision for the moment, if the promised efficiency actually carries through into everyday use.
Meteor Lake is a revolution - not so much because of the CPU itself, but because Intel is using the services of another foundry for its mainline CPUs for the first time. Intel will continue down this path with the upcoming platforms Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake - and we are curious what the final result of this move will be.
Transparency
The author has received the information in this article at an event of the manufacturer. Travel and hotel expenses for the event have been covered completely or partially by the manufacturer. The manufacturer was given no influence over the content, there was no obligation to publish.
Source(s)
Intel
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