PC Industry Awaits Meteor Lake

Now that the fanfare around last week’s AMD announcements has died down, industry attention is sure to be turning towards the launch of the long-awaited Intel Core Ultra processors (code-named Meteor Lake) on December 14.

Meteor Lake marks Intel’s first processor family using its new Intel 4 process and EUV (extreme ultraviolet lithography) technology. This line is also Intel’s first to feature a tile architecture. Its design allows Intel to optimize each tile’s cost, performance, and power, and to avoid using an expensive single process for the entire chip.

The Intel 4 process is being used for producing the compute tile in Meteor Lake. Other components like the GPU and SOC tiles utilize TSMC’s 5nm and 6nm processes. Intel combines all the tiles using its advanced 3D Foveros packaging technology.

The SOC tile includes an NPU for AI application acceleration independent of the CPU or GPU. Intel’s AI PC Acceleration Program enables hardware and software developers to utilize the NPU features by providing toolchains, co-engineering, hardware, design resources, and technical expertise.

The launch of Meteor Lake gives Intel an opportunity to regain some of the momentum it has lost over the past few years in the PC market. It is going to be fascinating to see how this new chip stacks up against the latest AMD Ryzen 8040 series mobile processors announced last week.