Intel's Meteor Lake processors are seemingly on track to launch sometime in the second half of 2023, so it is not surprising to see benchmark results leak one way or another. However, more surprising than the benchmarks, the company has also admitted that it will re-brand its venerable Core lineup with the arrival of Meteor Lake.
We reached out to Intel for a comment, and while the company didn't confirm specifics, it did indicate that there is going to be a shakeup in its branding. "We are making brand changes as we are at an inflection point in our client roadmap in preparation for the upcoming launch of our Meteor Lake processors," an Intel spokesperson told Tom's Hardware. "We will provide more details regarding these exciting changes in the coming weeks."
This time around, Intel's upcoming CPU ended up in the Ashes of Singularity database (via @BenchLeaks), and while the test results hardly bring any valuable performance information, they reveal some details about the specifications and branding of these processors.
The alleged Meteor Lake processor tested in AOTS is branded as the Core Ultra 5 1003H, which indicates that the company is prepping to drop its i3, i5, i7, and i9 classification for at least some of its upcoming mobile Meteor Lake CPUs. At this point, it's unclear what 'Ultra' and '5' mean in this combination and what other categories will be in the lineup, but Pro and Max classes obviously come to mind.
Meanwhile, it's tough to guess the actual configuration of Intel's Core Ultra 5 1003H processor, which allegedly has 18 physical and 18 logical cores.
Interestingly, SiSoftware's Sandra database also lists a 2.10 GHz Meteor Lake processor with an integrated GPU featuring 128CUs, which likely corresponds to 1024 stream processors. To date, this is the most powerful integrated GPU.
As for the AOTS test results themselves, the Core Ultra 5 1003H CPU hit 1300 points in DirectX 11 mode and 1920x1080 resolution, which is in line with Intel's Core i7-12700 with UHD Graphics 770.
Keeping in mind that Intel's Meteor Lake processor featuring a multi-tile design is at least a few months away, take the information from unofficial sources with a grain of salt. Intel has confirmed it is changing the branding but hasn't given us details yet. Someone could conceivably rename an existing Intel processor into Core Ultra 5 1003H and then upload its test results to the AOTS database. So the naming scheme could be fabricated, but Intel has confirmed to us that at least some level of brand change is incoming, likely arriving alongside its Meteor Lake chips. Whether or not this will permeate throughout the mobile and desktop stack remains to be seen.
