Intel is readying its 14th Generation Meteor Lake processors for the second half of the year. A product of the chipmaker's Intel 4 (previously 7nm) manufacturing process, Meteor Lake will arrive for both laptop and desktop formats but presumably on the former first. Unearthed by hardware detective momomo_us, we get a first peek at two alleged Meteor Lake processors for mobile devices.
Intel continues to go down the hybrid path with Meteor Lake. Meteor Lake, which features a multi-tile design, will employ Redwood Cove performance cores (P-cores) to handle heavy workloads while saving the Cresmont efficient cores (E-cores) for simpler tasks. The design allows for maximizing performance without sacrificing power consumption. However, Meteor Lake may feature a third type of core, presently rumored as the LP E-cores (low-power efficient cores). The rumor appears to be legit since an Intel patent has shown two additional Cresmont cores inside the SoC tile, which appears to feature a larger process node.
Meteor Lake has four tiles: Graphics, SoC, CPU, and IOE. The LP E-cores reside inside the SoC tile, which performs functions equivalent to the I/O Die (IOD) in AMD Ryzen processors. According to previously leaked documents, Meteor Lake supports "Low-power island CPU offload," implying that the LP E-cores' job may involve taking care of processes when the processor is in idle or sleep mode. If accurate, it would substantially help reduce power consumption in laptops. Meteor Lake, like previous hybrid chips before it, will look good on paper due to the overall high core count. In Meteor Lake's case, we would also factor in the LP E-cores.
The first Meteor Lake sample emerged with 14 cores that likely adhere to a 4P + 8E design, whereas the second Meteor Lake sample has 16 cores that should stick to a 6P + 8E layout. The remaining two cores in both engineering sample (ES) processors are from the LP E-cores. The 14-core Meteor Lake chip reportedly has 14MB of L2 cache and 16MB of L3 cache. The processor has a 3.26 GHz clock speed. The processor may very well be the recently leaked Core Ultra 5 1003H. On the other hand, the 16-core variant appears to have 18 MB of L2 cache and 24MB of L3 cache. It runs with a 3.07 GHz base clock and a 4.2 GHz boost clock.
However, the SiSoftware benchmark report doesn't pick up Meteor Lake's L4 cache (ADM or Adamantine). Although Intel's patent doesn't specifically mention Meteor Lake, early Linux patches have suggested that ADM is present on the upcoming 7nm processors.
Intel's hosting a series of Vision 2023 regional events this month, starting one that took place at Orland between May 8 and May 10. There are still three more on the chipmaker's list: Taipei (May 24 to May 25, Shanghai (May 30 to May 31), and Amsterdam (June 13 to June 14). Therefore, we may learn more about Meteor Lake in the upcoming weeks.
