It’s simple, Intel’s Meteor Lake is a mobile chip
A DISCLOSURE. I don’t just enjoy the tech rumor mill, I’m involved in it. It’s fun to track upcoming chips from Nvidia and Intel as they progress from mere whisper to retail reality. But as a journalist, you’re only as good as your next rumor, which is why things can get a bit silly sometimes.
That’s exactly what’s happened with the rumors revolving around Intel’s upcoming desktop Meteor Lake CPUs. But actually, it’s simple. Meteor was probably never meant to be a desktop processor. That Intel’s Meteor Lake processors exist is far from a secret. It is mentioned by senior Intel suits every time the company updates the markets on its progress. Meteor Lake, we are assured, remains on track for production later this year.
Meteor Lake will be its first consumer processor to use chiplets or, in Intel parlance, tiles. It will be four tiles: one for the CPU cores, one for the integrated GPU, an SoC tile, and an IO tile. It will also be the first CPU on Intel 4, the upcoming process node formerly known as 7nm. This is all public information, as is the fact that Meteor Lake’s graphics tile will be manufactured by TSMC.
Where the silly season rumors come in involves the specifics around Meteor Lake’s core counts and the exact SKUs it will be available in. The first big controversy around it was a rumor claiming that it will be limited to just six performance cores. That’s fewer, notably, than both Alder Lake and Intel’s incumbent CPU architecture Raptor Lake.
Only six big cores? What was the company thinking? This obviously meant that Intel 4 was a disaster and Intel’s plans in tatters. After all, it turns out that it’s not even good enough to produce a CPU with eight performance cores. Then came a rumor that Meteor Lake was in such bad shape that the desktop variant, Meteor Lake-S
All the guff about cancellations and downgrades is just the internet getting wound up about nothing
had been cancelled altogether. What a catastrophe.
Except, that’s likely all wrong. Or rather, it’s a misinterpretation. It’s more likely that Meteor Lake has always been targeted at mobile platforms. Indeed, Intel has form when it comes to rolling out chips on a new production node for mobile first. It’s remarkable how quickly everyone seems to have forgotten Ice Lake, Intel’s first 10nm CPU, which was mobile only. Indeed, Tiger Lake, Intel’s second 10nm architecture, was mobileonly too. And both Ice Lake and Tiger Lake had fewer cores than Intel’s desktop CPUs at the time.
Wind back to Intel’s 14nm node and the first 14nm CPU was the Broadwell mobile chip. Okay, Intel later released a few Broadwell desktop SKUs, but it was primarily a mobile processor. As is often the case, rumors around Meteor Lake are connected to reality. It probably will be limited to six performance cores, and there probably won’t be a desktop variant. But that’s likely because that’s what Intel intended.
So, Meteor Lake will be the first Intel 4 processor and for laptops only. It will be followed by Arrow Lake, which is closely related, but actually designed for the desktop. All the guff about cancellations and downgrades is just the internet getting wound up about nothing.
Anyway, the rumor mill will grind on regardless. Alongside Meteor Lake, there’s Intel’s supposed Royal Core, a mystical architecture due several years hence that’s said to deliver unprecedented architectural and performance improvements. It’s very much a staple topic of the tech chatterati, but it has never appeared on an Intel roadmap and can be traced back to a single source with a hitand-miss record when it comes to leaks and rumors.
But where’s the fun in acknowledging any of that when you can turn a single mention of an unconfirmed Intel CPU architecture into a series of hightraffic YouTube exposes? It’s just so silly, but I can’t deny it’s fun.