Intel Meteor Lake will be a major revolution

There is still more than a year to go before the official launch of the Intel Meteor Lake processors, but thanks to the leaks that have accumulated over the last two years we have quite a bit of information about this new generation, and this information also it is becoming more and more reliable.

This time we get a leak that has been extracted directly from Microsoft monitoring logs, and in them we can see a clear reference to the Intel Meteor Lake processors and the architectures that they are going to use. We have on one side Redwood Covewhich would be used in high performance kernels, and on the other hand it is Crestmontwhich will be the architecture used by high-efficiency kernels.

Intel Meteor Lake will succeed Intel Raptor Lake, a generation of processors that will succeed Alder Lake and that will arrive later this year. This generation will use the Raptor Cove architecture in its high-performance cores and the Gracemont architecture in its high-efficiency cores, and will be compatible with current LGA1700 motherboards.

Why do we say that Intel Meteor Lake will be a revolution?

There are three great keys that allow us to explain it in a simple way. The first clue is that Intel Meteor Lake will be the chip giant’s first generation of mainstream processors that will use intel node 4 (7nm with higher transistor density than TSMC’s 5nm node). This represents a huge leap forward in terms of performance and efficiency compared to the Intel 7 node (10nm with higher transistor density than TSMC’s 7nm node) that Intel Raptor Lake will use.

The second key is in the use of two completely new architectures. Intel Raptor Lake is going to use a new architecture on its high-performance cores, but will keep the Gracemont architecture on its high-efficiency cores. By contrast, Intel Meteor Lake will use a new architecture in both core blockswhich should result in a much larger increase in IPC, and could push high-efficiency cores to a very interesting performance level.

Finally we have a third key that is certainly not confirmed, but has generated a lot of commotion, and that is that Intel Meteor Lake could have an additional block of ultra-low power cores, which would be used to help manage such important things as CPU state changes, core management, and anything else needed by the Intel Thread Director subsystem. These cores would not be integrated into the computing block, but in the SoC block, which we can see in the cover image.

I remind you that the Intel Meteor Lake processors will use a new socket, known as LGA1851, will only be compatible with DDR5 memory and will come with an integrated Intel Xe-LPG GPU, configured with between 128 and 192 execution units, depending on each processor. The maximum number of cores and threads has not yet transpired, but it is said that it could have 8 high-performance Redwood Cove cores and 24 high-efficiency Crestmont cores.