Intel’s Meteor Lake processors are the first chiplet-based (modular) CPUs from Team Blue, featuring a heterogeneous core mixture and varying process technology. A recent leak indicates that the Core Ultra chips may suffer from slow memory speeds, as a result. In the AIDA64 cache/memory benchmark, the Intel Core Ultra 9 185H recorded an L3 cache latency of 49 ms, nearly 3x higher (worse) than the 13th Gen Raptor Lake processors.
The L3 read|write, and copy speeds were a third of the expected value, dropping to 568/s|303GB/s and 372GB/s, respectively. For reference, the Core i9-13900K reports read, write, and copy values of 1821GB/s, 636GB/s, and 1,000GB/s, with a latency of 16.9ms.
The L1 and L2 bandwidth is even worse. The 185H reported L1 read and write speeds of 1471GB/s and 1479GB/s, compared to 5811GB/s and 3554GB/s on the 13900K. That’s 4x slower than erstwhile 13th Gen SoCs. The latency was a closer match, coming in at 1.0ns and 0.9ns for the two chips, respectively.
There’s a good chance that these values represent the memory bandwidth/latency of the LP cores on the SoC die, but they lack an L3 cache altogether. Furthermore, AIDA64 recently released a beta patch to fix the reported figures on hybrid core processors.
For the time being, it’s impossible to tell for sure. We’ll have to wait for the official launch and the forthcoming third-party benchmarks to come to a definitive conclusion. That said, it’s important to note that, unlike AMD’s chiplet CPUs, all of Intel’s P and E cores lie on the same die, reducing the chances of such a penalty unless you’re considering the LP cores on the SoC die.
Source: HXL.
