The “Meteor Lake-S” Socket for Intel’s Next-Gen Desktop Platform introduces 6P+16E core counts.
With the launch of the new Socket LGA1851, Intel will replace the current LGA1700 in keeping with the cycle of two generations of desktop processors per socket. The processor package will probably be the same size as LGA1700, and the two sockets might be compatible with the same coolers. The 14th Gen Core “Meteor Lake-S” will be the first processor microarchitecture to make an appearance on LGA1851. Compared to “Raptor Lake,” these chips will have fewer CPU cores per generation, but their IPC on P- and E-cores will increase noticeably.
As part of its IDM 2.0 strategy, “Raptor Lake” is Intel’s penultimate monolithic silicon client processor before the company switches to chiplets constructed on several foundry nodes. The highest CPU core configuration for “Meteor Lake-S,” the client-desktop version of “Meteor Lake,” will be 6P+16E (i.e., 6 performance cores with 16 efficiency cores). The chip has 16 “Crestmont” E-cores and 6 “Redwood Cove” P-cores. Both of them should receive IPC improvements, making the processor quicker (and hopefully more effective) than the top “Raptor Lake-S” component. In particular, it ought to be able to make up for the loss of 2 P-cores.
The physical low CPU core count compared to the previous generation (8 vs. 10-core for “Comet Lake-S”) meant that both the Core i7-11700K and i9-11900K ended up being 8-core/16-thread processors. Intel may run into a similar product differentiation issue with the 12th Gen Core “Rocket Lake-S” desktop processors. Here, we can observe that the core configuration of almost all top SKUs, divided into clock speeds, is 6P+16E, whereas the core configuration of the mid-tier SKUs is 6P+8E.
In addition to the CPU, “Meteor Lake-S” is anticipated to introduce the brand-new Xe-LPG graphics architecture for the iGPU, which might satisfy DirectX 12 Ultimate logo specifications. The “Meteor Lake-S” processor’s iGPU is anticipated to have 4 Xe Cores, or 64 EUs, and 512 unified shaders. This would still represent a huge improvement over the “Raptor Lake-S” iGPU’s 32 EUs.
With the 15th Gen “Arrow Lake-S” processor, Intel is anticipated to return CPU core counts to current levels (2024-25). Core configurations up to 8P+16E are anticipated for these processors. The P-cores receive improved performance in addition to having more cores, while the E-cores are anticipated to remain unchanged. The “Compute Tile” (the die containing the CPU cores) for “Meteor Lake-S” is constructed using the Intel 4 node, which has isopower properties similar to those of the TSMC 5 nm node, while those for “Arrow Lake-S” will be constructed using the Intel 20A node, which Intel is promoting as a ground-breaking node competitive with TSMC’s sub 2 nm nodes.
