Intel will launch Meteor Lake on December 14th — this is Intel’s Core Ultra

Intel has announced that its highly anticipated Meteor Lake chips will “launch” on December 14th. According to the company, Meteor Lake will be the most power-efficient client processor Intel has ever made, with up to twice the graphics performance. It will also feature a “low power island” that can run tasks independently and will be able to intelligently control the new chips through integration with Microsoft Windows.

One key feature of Meteor Lake is its use of chiplets, which are separate pieces of silicon printed at different sizes and grafted together, similar to Lego-like building blocks. While heterogeneous computing is relatively new to Intel, AMD and Qualcomm have been using this approach for a while. The advantage of chiplets is that they allow companies to choose the best building blocks and selectively cut off power to the rest of the chip.

Meteor Lake will have two processors cores – one on a low power island and another distributed among a “Compute Tile.” The low power island is designed for workloads that require the lowest power consumption. The Compute Tile houses the P (Performance) and E (Efficiency) cores, as well as a separate Graphics Tile. The chip will also feature an enhanced “Thread Director” that prioritizes the use of lower-power cores before activating higher-power ones.

The graphics capabilities of Meteor Lake will be powered by Intel Arc graphics, which offer up to twice the performance per watt compared to previous generations. The GPU will also support Intel’s XeSS technology for intelligent upscaling, similar to Nvidia’s DLSS and AMD’s FSR.

Intel has also developed its own low-cost vapor chamber cooling solution for Meteor Lake, which will be used in gaming and creator laptops.

One of the key aspects of Meteor Lake is the inclusion of a dedicated AI coprocessor, known as the NPU (Neural Processing Unit). The NPU will be available across the full product stack of Meteor Lake, offering improved efficiency for AI-related tasks. The NPU will work in conjunction with the GPU to optimize performance and energy efficiency.

While Intel has not provided specific performance or battery life details about Meteor Lake, the company claims that yields of the Intel 4 parts of the chip are better than previous generations. Intel is investing heavily in the future of chip innovation, with plans to invest $3.5 billion in New Mexico and $7 billion in Penang, Malaysia, over the next 10 years.

Overall, Intel’s Meteor Lake chips show the company’s commitment to developing power-efficient processors with improved graphics capabilities and dedicated AI coprocessors. The chiplets approach allows for greater customization and power optimization, making them an exciting development in the world of computer chip technology.