Intel's next-gen Meteor Lake CPUs: A game-changing 40-year architectural shift to rival Apple

Intel calls Meteor Lake its "biggest architectural shift in 40 years" and that it will "lay the foundation for innovations for the PC," as noted by Tim Wilson, VP, Design and Engineering Group and GM, SoC Design at Intel.

Previous generation naming would suggest it would be called Intel 14th Gen, but Intel is moving away from its older naming schema. Some reports have suggested Meteor Lake may reflect a reboot in generation numbers.
Interestingly, while Meteor Lake may finally start to match Apple on efficiency, the design and feature set for Meteor Lake began over four years ago before Apple's M-series existed. That means Meteor Lake isn't so much a reaction to Apple's M-series but was planned independently.

The significant change for Meteor Lake is what Intel calls disaggregation, which means the breaking down of core components into separate ‘tiles’ on the SoC. Meteor Lake features four Tiles, including:

• Compute Tile: New E-core and P-core microarchitecture, built on Intel 4 process technology
• SoC Tile: Low power island E-cores, NPU, Wi-Fi 6E/7, native HDMI 2.1 and 8K HDR AV1 support
• Graphics Tile: Integrated Intel Arc architecture
• IO Tile: Thunderbolt 4 (and presumably Thunderbolt 5) and PCIe Gen5

First, separating core components (“disaggregating”) allows the SoC to turn off certain parts when not used. For instance, Media IP, including support for playing back video, previously was on the integrated GPU. However, Intel doesn’t need that much power for just video, so instead, it has moved to the main SoC Tile. This means when streaming or using local video file playback, the power-hungry integrated GPU “shuts off” since everything needed is found on the SoC Tile.

Next is the introduction of new low-power island E-cores. Intel Alder and Raptor Lake chips featured E-cores (“efficiency”) for lower power functions and P-cores (“performance”) for primary ones where more power is needed. Those cores, while improved in Meteor Lake, have been moved to the new Compute Tile. New and additional low-power island E-cores remain on the SoC Tile. These new E-cores draw even less power and offer a third level of performance, mainly for system background functionality in Windows. The updated Intel Thread Director, in combination with optimizations in Windows 11, lets the OS handle which cores get used for which tasks.

Think of it this way: When your PC is idling and not running any core tasks, these low-power E-cores take over, letting the P- and E-cores on the Compute Tile “turn off.”

Intel includes a discrete neural processing unit (NPU) on the SoC Tile. This chip offloads AI tasks like background blurring for webcams, on-the-fly noise removal for microphones, and even localized large language models (LLMs). This frees up all the P- and E-cores for everyday Windows tasks without degradation in performance. Moreover, Intel’s NPU draws much less power, which adds to the increased efficiency of Meteor Lake.

The GPU is also getting a significant overhaul as Intel is porting its Arc GPU technology to Meteor Lake, delivering up to 2x the performance of Iris Xe found in 12th and 13th-generation CPUs. Because it’s built on Arc, driver compatibility is mainly taken care of, as Intel has created upwards of 30 drivers for Arc in the last year.

When all these tiles are combined and managed by the Intel Thread Director (and Windows 11), Intel has maintained (or exceeded performance) while sharply reducing power consumption since there are specialized pieces of the SoC for every task, and none require the other tiles to be powered to function.

Intel uses its new Foveros advanced packaging technology, which uses “high density, high bandwidth, low power interconnects to enable large, disaggregated die complexes made up of individual tiles manufactured across multiple process nodes.”

The shift is so significant that it's undoubtedly related to a total reset of its naming system. Rather than simply becoming the predictable 15th Gen, Meteor Lake marks a significant milestone at the dawn of locally-processed AI with a dedicated NPU alongside an overhaul to integrated graphics with Intel Arc.

The big question, of course, is how Intel's Meteor Lake compares to Qualcomm's forthcoming Oryon (ARM) processors (made by the team who designed Apple's processors), where AMD goes with Ryzen, and how Intel's efficiency efforts compare to Apple's new M3 series of CPUs. The good news is that processor competition has never looked so good, meaning consumers will be the big winners in 2024.