Intel’s Meteor Lake CPUs Might Not Release On Desktop

Intel’s 14th-gen processor series called Meteor Lake is based on a tile-based design, making it harder to manufacture compared to a conventional processor.

As we move towards smaller nm architecture in chips, the need for innovation increases more and more.

AMD did their own way of innovating their Ryzen processors by adapting a chiplet based design. Where a single CPU would have two chiplets inside it, each consisting of 8 cores max. The reason is simple, the smaller the chip is, the higher chance of picking the good ones out of a silicon wafer, giving higher yields and massively saving costs.

After years of waiting, Intel decided that it needed to do something like that too. So Intel announced that it’s next-gen, that is, 14th-gen Meteor Lake CPU processors will come with a tile-based design.

While AMD went for two smaller core chiplets and a big I/O chiplet, Intel has decided to do it differently.

Intel Meteor Lake’s Tile-based Design

In Meteor Lake, Intel has announced that the processor will have 4 tiles. One SOC tile, one IO Tile, one GFX (GPU) tile and one CPU tile. The CPU tile will have all the performance and efficiency cores inside it.

While moving forward, this is an ideal move taken by Intel. As a big monolithic CPU would get harder and harder to manufacture and splitting things inside a processor is better. The problem is that, it seems that making a tile-based processor isn’t easy either. We aren’t sure what exactly is the status of these processors currently.

Intel Meteor Lake Desktop Maybe Cancelled

From some time now, there are rumors that Intel might cancel the Meteor Lake Desktop processor. This rumor became public by a tweet by a known Twitter based leaker @OneRaichu.

In it, he mentions that Intel has most likely converted whatever chips or design they had for Meteor Lake desktop into Meteor Lake mobile CPUs.

The MTL-S chip is referring to is Meteor Lake desktop. With MTL being Meteor Lake and S being the desktop variants of Intel Core processors.

It’s entirely possible that Intel tried making a tile-based desktop chip, but was not able to do so yet. Hence, making it available only for laptops.

Meteor Lake Might Target Efficiency More Than Performance

Another hint that Meteor Lake might not release on desktop is from an earlier tweet by OneRaichu.

In it, he mentions how Meteor Lake is going to target 1.5x times the efficiency of the current generation Raptor Lake.

Efficiency is something that mobile processors used in laptops benefit more than just desktop processors.

More Information About A Possible Meteor Lake Desktop Appears

To make things more confusing, another Twitter based leaker has shared the details about a possible Meteor Lake Desktop CPU. Twitter based leaker @leaf_hobby had posted a now deleted Tweet sharing the details about possible Meteor Lake Desktop features.

In that tweet, it is mentioned that Intel Meteor Lake Desktop will have x20 PCIe 5.0 lanes from the CPU. One x16 for the graphics card and one x4 possibly for an M.2 SSD.

It also mentions that the Z890 chipset might have an additional x4 PCIe 4.0 lanes, totaling x24 lanes. This is x4 more than what is found in current-gen Raptor Lake processors. Debut support for Wi-Fi 7 too is stated.

But what makes interesting is that it mentions that Meteor Lake Desktop has only 6 performance cores with 8 performance cores version possibly under or not under development. This is where it gets interesting. 6 performance cores are found in the Raptor Lake P (mobile variant), so does that support OneRaichu’s contention that Meteor Lake-S (desktop) processors are now converted to Meteor Lake-P (mobile) instead.

When asked about it, leaf_hobby doesn’t deny that being a possibility.

The @leaf_hobby, however, has later shared that their accounts are getting compromised repeatedly after leaking details about Intel. So they have decided to stop sharing Intel related information.

Either way, for now, we cannot say anything for sure about Meteor Lake. Whatever it maybe, there’s one thing almost certain, Intel is going to release Raptor Lake Refresh processors with higher clock rates this year. With Meteor Lake likely to be delayed till next year.

Intel’s Meteor Lake CPUs Might Not Release On Desktop