Meteor Lake Mobile Block Diagram Leaks

by Josh Norem

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(Photo: PC Watch)There’s been a lot of discussion lately about Intel’s 14th generation architecture, Meteor Lake. It’s due to arrive in the second half of 2023 following Raptor Lake. It’ll be the company’s first tile-based architecture, and it will be built on the Intel 4 process. The mobile version should debut first, and German overclocking site Igor’s Lab has received some juicy details about what it will offer. The site has posted full specs for the U, P, and H variants of the mobile architecture. The slides reveal some interesting details that haven’t been mentioned before, assuming these rumors are true. As always, rumors about pre-release products that won’t see the light of day for over a year should be treated cautiously.

To begin, the MTL-H and MTL-P variants are for high performance. The MTL-U version is low-power, high efficiency. That bracketing is unchanged from Alder Lake. The more powerful H-and-P series will max out at 14 cores, with the U-series gaining two more cores over Alder Lake for a maximum of 12. One thing that seems new is the addition of LP-E cores. On Alder Lake there were just “big” P-cores and “little” E-cores. Now there appears to be a new version of E-cores, with increased efficiency.

It’s not clear if these different types of E-core share the same design, with the LP-E type being binned or not. However, our guess is that they are just binned versions of the regular E-cores. Also, Igor says Intel will put the GPU on top of the CPU with its Foveros stacking technology. However, the diagrams Intel has published previously shows them side-by-side, so we’re not sure where Igor is getting that from.

Stacking the GPU on top of the CPU may be possible, but it depends on the specifics of the circuit layout. While AMD’s 5800X3D stacks a large vertical L3 cache, AMD has positioned the cache so it doesn’t sit directly over any CPU hot spots. Intel would need to do the same, while accounting for the fact that an on-die GPU can be a significant source of heat in its own right. This isn’t impossible, but if true, it’s a change compared to what Intel has previously disclosed.