Intel’s 14th Gen Meteor Lake processors are slated to launch in the last quarter of the year. It will feature a chiplet design with four disaggregated dies and combine the next-gen Core architectures with the Xe graphics IP (the one powering Alchemist). The compute die will be fabbed on the Intel 4 process, while the graphics tile will be manufactured on TSMC’s 4nm node. The SoC and I/O dies will be fabbed on more mature external nodes (likely N6 or N7).
A SiSoft listing of a Meteor Lake-P chip indicates that the 14th Gen processors will pack up to 128MB of L4 cache, codenamed Adamantine Cache. This large on-package cache will speed up CPU-to-memory, CPU-to-iGPU, and CPU-to-SoC transactions.
Including a fourth-level cache won’t be as effective as the large L2 or L3 cache used by its rivals (NVIDIA RTX 40 and AMD Ryzen X3D), but it will certainly boost performance in latency-sensitive applications like games. The presence of a low latency on-die cache will drastically reduce the number of memory accesses, improving power efficiency and memory bottlenecks.
The Meteor Lake-P CPU is a U-series part with 15-28W TDP alongside 4MB of L2 cache and 128MB of LLC. The iGPU appears to be a midrange part with 64 Compute Units running at 1.9GHz. We’re likely looking at the boost clock here because the Irix Xe iGPUs mostly operate under 1.5GHz.
It’ll be interesting to see if the L4 cache improves the iGPU performance or just the primary CPU performance. Intel’s 5th Gen Broadwell CPUs are infamous for offering dGPU-level gaming performance with their iGPUs because of the large eDRAM (embedded DRAM). We can expect similar results with Meteor Lake-P.
Source: @momomo_us.
