Laptop OEMs to allegedly shift away from Intel's underwhelming Meteor Lake and offer more AMD Ryzen 8000U/H models

Intel released all the specs for the Meteor Lake mobile processors a little over two months ago, yet these chips are expected to be available in mid-December at the earliest. High volume will probably begin in Q1 2024, but by that time, AMD would already start to ship the refreshed Phoenix mobile processors codenamed “Hawk Point.” According to sources close to Moore’s Law is Dead, this delayed launch combined with overall lackluster performance is apparently driving laptop OEMs mad, to the point where most of them are rethinking next year’s configurations in order to include more next gen AMD processors.

To start things off, MLID provides a quote from an Intel contact that is responsible with OEM communications:

[...] I’d like to confirm that at least in some scenarios Meteor Lake is definitely performing below what our partners expected.

I am not sure what went wrong, it’s not my department, but in the past month my days have been filled with meetings with angry OEMs asking us why Meteor Lake is barely better than Raptor Lake in their testing.

Speaking about the delayed launch and things that did not go according to plan, one OEM told MLID:

In some form factors Meteor Lake IS better than Raptor Lake, but it isn’t always  better… and that’s just not good enough. We were planning for an Alder Lake moment for 2023 Back To School sales, and instead we seem to be getting an Ice Lake moment that misses the holidays.

The same OEM mentions that, because of the incentives offered by Intel, laptop integrators do not usually order significant stocks of AMD processors so they cannot change their offerings too fast in case sales stagnate:

[...]We have to sell Intel, and we’ve been waiting for YEARS for something exciting and new that isn’t just another refresh of Alder Lake.

Now we’re going to have to try to convince consumers they need some expensive 'AI Laptop' this January that effectively does nothing new with tiles besides cost more than what they could buy 2 years ago.

Another major OEM is talking about an overhaul of the entire Meteor Lake marketing as a result of the underwhelming CPU performance:

In our final testing there’s no appreciable CPU performance uplift with Meteor Lake over Raptor Lake, and this you’re going to see us lean into AI, Graphics and per/Watt for marketing.

[...]I can promise you that everyone I personally work with (including me) expected a general performance uplift to happen in addition to major efficiency improvements.

Actually, on that note, AI was only ever going to be a bonus selling point for MTL, and it’s only in the past few months Intel suddenly told us to focus on that as the main selling point.

One last quote comes from one of Intel's biggest OEM partners and MLID underlines how shocking their negative comments are:

We won’t be supporting Meteor Lake in our products above what’s necessary to keep a satisfactory relationship with Intel, and we will be utilizing Hawk Point and Strix Point as quickly as possible next year with as much volume as they will give us…

We see the writing on the wall, it’s time to go 50/50 Intel/AMD in laptop as quickly as possible - we don’t want to get screwed over like this ever again.

MLID believes that these problems should have been taken into consideration ever since Intel signaled Meteor Lake for desktop is not happening. Moreover, Meteor Lake being almost on par with Raptor Lake-U/P/H should allow AMD to take the lead with Hawk Point with its 15% expected performance uplift over Phoenix and then half a year later Strix Point should add another 25-50% advantage even before Lunar Lake makes an appearance.

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