Intel 14th Gen Meteor Lake CPU Pictured In The Silicon Flesh Flaunting Next-Gen Tiles
At its Intel Vision event in Dallas suburb Grapevine, Texas where it announced the 12th-gen Alder Lake-HX mobile CPUs, Intel also had an exhibition showing off its fancy new manufacturing technology. The company has been rapidly striding away from monolithic processor fabrication in the last couple of years, and while its next processors, the 13th-generation Raptor Lake, will still be single pieces of silicon, it's chiplets all the way down for 14th-gen Meteor Lake.
We've seen a photo of a manufacturing test before, but Intel has real Meteor Lake chips up and running already, and it seems it brought a couple of them along to the Intel Vision event. Indeed, two examples of Meteor Lake were on display, one of which was a standard-sized package intended for laptops, while the other was a "high-density" package that could be used in extra-small devices like netbooks or handhelds.
Intel Meteor Lake Standard Density package. Image: HotHardware!
As expected, you can see four separate dice in the photos, tightly joined on a single package using EMIB—so tightly, in fact, that if you don't look from the right angle, it looks like a single large die. Notably, these processors include CPU tiles fabricated by Intel while the GPU tiles are fabricated at TSMC; Intel joins them all together in the final assembly phase.
Intel has already confirmed that Meteor Lake will scale all the way from 5W up to 125W, but it seems like both of these processors on display are destined for mobile systems. So saying, Intel hasn't shown Meteor Lake on the desktop yet, so we don't actually know what the configurations of those chips will be. For the mobile parts, we're likely looking at six-to-eight Redwood Cove P-cores, zero-to-sixteen Crestmont E-cores, and Battlemage integrated GPUs with up to 192 EUs.
According to Intel, Meteor Lake's on the way in 2023, but we'd expect it in the latter half given that Raptor Lake is still coming this year. That said, we have heard rumors that Meteor Lake will be arriving sooner than anticipated. Despite the significant changes in Raptor Lake (compared to 12th-gen Alder Lake), Intel could do a limited release of it and hurry Meteor Lake to market if AMD's Zen 4 is offering stiff competition for the 13th-gen processors.
