Discussion Intel Meteor, Arrow, Lunar & Panther Lakes Discussion Threads

Tigerick · Aug 22, 2022

As Hot Chips 34 starting this week, Intel will unveil technical information of upcoming Meteor Lake (MTL) and Arrow Lake (ARL), new generation platform after Raptor Lake. Both MTL and ARL represent new direction which Intel will move to multiple chiplets and combine as one SoC platform.

MTL also represents new compute tile that based on Intel 4 process which is based on EUV lithography, a first from Intel. Intel expects to ship MTL mobile SoC in 2023.

ARL will come after MTL so Intel should be shipping it in 2024, that is what Intel roadmap is telling us. ARL compute tile will be manufactured by Intel 20A process, a first from Intel to use GAA transistors called RibbonFET.

Comparison of upcoming Intel's U-series CPU: Core Ultra 100U, Lunar Lake and Panther Lake

Model	Code-Name	Date	TDP	Node	Tiles	Main Tile	CPU	LP E-Core	LLC	GPU	Xe-cores
Core Ultra 100U	Meteor Lake	Q4 2023	15 - 57 W	Intel 4 + N5 + N6	4	tCPU	2P + 8E	2	12 MB	Intel Graphics	4
?	Lunar Lake	Q4 2024	17 - 30 W	N3B + N6	2	CPU + GPU & IMC	4P + 4E	0	12 MB	Arc	8
?	Panther Lake	Q1 2026 ?	?	Intel 18A + N3E	3	CPU + MC	4P + 8E	4	?	Arc	12

Comparison of die size of Each Tile of Meteor Lake, Arrow Lake, Lunar Lake and Panther Lake

	Meteor Lake	Arrow Lake (N3B)	Lunar Lake	Panther Lake
Platform	Mobile H/U Only	Desktop & Mobile H&HX	Mobile U Only	Mobile H
Process Node	Intel 4	TSMC N3B	TSMC N3B	Intel 18A
Date	Q4 2023	Desktop-Q4-2024 H&HX-Q1-2025	Q4 2024	Q1 2026 ?
Full Die	6P + 8P	8P + 16E	4P + 4E	4P + 8E
LLC	24 MB	36 MB ?	12 MB	?
tCPU	66.48
tGPU	44.45
SoC	96.77
IOE	44.45
Total	252.15

Intel Core Ultra 100 - Meteor Lake

As mentioned by Tomshardware, TSMC will manufacture the I/O, SoC, and GPU tiles. That means Intel will manufacture only the CPU and Foveros tiles. (Notably, Intel calls the I/O tile an 'I/O Expander,' hence the IOE moniker.)

Fjodor2001 · May 1, 2025

OneEng2 said:
While I agree that 52 cores seems like a proposition that will only be appealing to a limited number of users, 3D vcache is ALSO a proposition that is only appealing to a limited number of users IMO.

4C 4-ever, since nearly no one will ever need more than that. Used to be Intel™. Now the situation is reversed, so it's 16C 4-ever but AMD™, since 2019.

gdansk · May 1, 2025

Fjodor2001 said:
4C 4-ever, since nearly no one will ever need more than that. Used to be Intel™. Now the situation is reversed, so it's 16C 4-ever but AMD™, since 2019.

It's 32T thread since 2019 and no one yet has surpassed it. If Intel actually does build >32T consumer processor (on a dual channel platform) I have to wonder what they're smoking.

Fjodor2001 · May 1, 2025

gdansk said:
It's 32T thread since 2019 and no one yet has surpassed it. If Intel actually does build >32T consumer processor (on a dual channel platform) I have to wonder what they're smoking.

It’s 16C/32T for AMD since 2019, and it was 4C/8T when Intel blocked progress previously with the same reasoning that nearly no consumer would need more than that.

This time it looks like it’ll be Intel that leads the way forward instead of AMD. So funnily enough, the roles are the opposite this time.

gdansk · May 1, 2025

Fjodor2001 said:
with the same reasoning that nearly no consumer would need more than that.

And this time it's true. 4 cores was not ample. Smartphones in the 8T era were 6 or 8C. Smartphones in the 32T are still 6 or 8C. I wonder why. Consumers do not need more than 16 cores. Their workloads aren't atomizable like server farms. They overwhelmingly need faster cores. CPU media transcoding is a niche within a niche. Poor unfortunate C++ developers abusing Boost without a build server are a niche within a niche.

The failure of Intel and AMD isn't spamming more cores (they've done enough of that and they'll continue when shrinks allow). It's a failure of making faster cores. If you value more cores > more 1T performance then there is another market for that.

reb0rn · May 1, 2025

I do not agree there is ppl that need more, consumer is not same now what was 6y ago, consumer now is special high end segment

511 · May 1, 2025

This is something only time will tell @Hulk will be happy to know that that he can buy a 52 core monster.

dr1337 · May 1, 2025

gdansk said:
And this time it's true. 4 cores was not ample. Smartphones in the 8T era were 6 or 8C. Smartphones in the 32T are still 6 or 8C. I wonder why. Consumers do not need more than 16 cores. Their workloads aren't atomizable like server farms. They overwhelmingly need faster cores. CPU media transcoding is a niche within a niche. Poor unfortunate C++ developers abusing Boost without a build server are a niche within a niche.

Nah, most devs don't have access to build servers and even then a lot of companies straight up don't have resources like that because they're not adobe or oracle. And its much faster for dev work anyways if all your guys can compile independently on their own machines instead of all having to fill the server queue.

Honestly at this rate I want to declare the consumer workload a myth. If you're already comparing PCs to phones in terms of performance, you aren't a PC customer. I find it quite hard to believe you actually have a workload where you're being held back by 1t performance on a modern x86 machine. Unless you're getting paid to run geekbench and your commission is determined by points per watt.

Time is real, just as 4c became obsolete, so will 16c, and so will 32c. Modern operating systems already field thousands of threads, games already can take full advantage of 16-24c CPUs, the compute demand isn't going down thats for sure.

Hulk · May 1, 2025

511 said:
This is something only time will tell @Hulk will be happy to know that that he can buy a 52 core monster.

Ah, but the question is to whom I will be giving my hard earned money for those cores?

jpiniero · May 1, 2025

I still don't think you really need all of those Cinebench Accelerators.

511 · May 1, 2025

I think game devs/content creator would find it attractable or maybe some OEM or Some Intel customer demanded it.
There must be a reason they are making 2*(8+16) also this time there is a lot of reuse with their architecture.

511 · May 1, 2025

Hulk said:
Ah, but the question is to whom I will be giving my hard earned money for those cores?

Mhh Intel?

poke01 · May 2, 2025

dr1337 said:
I find it quite hard to believe you actually have a workload where you're being held back by 1t performance on a modern x86 machine. Unless you're getting paid to run geekbench and your commission is determined by points per watt.

You do know the client web runs on 1t?

MS_AT · May 2, 2025

gdansk said:
Poor unfortunate C++ developers abusing Boost without a build server are a niche within a niche.

To be fair, we also need faster cores The number of cores can only help so much.

dr1337 said:
find it quite hard to believe you actually have a workload where you're being held back by 1t performance on a modern x86 machine.

I am, the workload was already mentioned here, it's c++ compilation.

dr1337 said:
games already can take full advantage of 16-24c CPUs

Do you have profiling data to back this up? I am just curious. Also it would be nice to define what full advantage is.

fastandfurious6 · May 2, 2025

estimated bench leaks late summer?

alcoholbob · May 2, 2025

MS_AT said:
To be fair, we also need faster cores The number of cores can only help so much.

I am, the workload was already mentioned here, it's c++ compilation.

Do you have profiling data to back this up? I am just curious. Also it would be nice to define what full advantage is.

I’m a bit skeptical of this, the engine that uses the most threads that I’m aware of (and is actually CPU heavy) is the newest iteration of Frostbite that uses 14 threads with BF2042. Cyberpunk’s Red engine uses up to 12. Doom’s engine supposedly can break up the workload into 16 but this isn’t really that demanding of a game CPU-wise, so it’s almost a moot point.

All of these will fit neatly into a 9800X3D with 16 threads. You can say having more threads helps in “real world scenarios” if you are running background tasks, but that’s a separate issue.

511 · May 2, 2025

Bruh 52 Cores ain't Targeted for gamers they should Cook big LLC Version for that.

dr1337 · May 2, 2025

MS_AT said:
Do you have profiling data to back this up? I am just curious. Also it would be nice to define what full advantage is.

Yeah its called STALKER 2, I had an issue with snipping tool for some reason but it will absolutely load up every thread I have at times, and thats a system wide bottleneck. A 16c CPU would be atleast at 50% and that is pretty utilized if you ask me.

Do you have any profile/data to backup your claim that you're being limited by ST perf with your compiler? Are you sure its not a you problem?

Also while im being gaslit/baited, I should also mention the farce that transcoding isn't relevant. Literally all media on the internet has to be rendered in some form or another and not every task is purely GPU offload-able. And even then, the best GPU encoders lag plenty behind CPU in terms of quality and you aren't going to see many ads or videos posted online that were exclusively encodes with nvidia or intel (let alone AMD) encoders.

Sure in an ideal world 10ghz processors would be a better focus for intel. But in this world, making ICs run that fast is infeasible and frankly I would NEVER prefer a return to the world where intel kept shrinking their 4c designs and increasing profit margins instead of shipping the consumer the same amount of silicon but with more functionality. But hey I guess everyone on this website loves paying more for less.

Addendum: I don't think its an issue that ST is being neglected, like at all. I think all the major CPU fabs focus on it. But for the same reasons mobile beat desktop to 8c are similar to the reason why desktop is ballooning in thread count. Its all in due time and hard limits on what can be done on a single thread. I think if intel could make a CPU that clocks/runs faster much faster they would, but the best any of them can do is increase core count. I mean, even apple is shipping 10c as standard now. Maybe this statement clears up my opinion for some folks.

dr1337 · May 2, 2025

alcoholbob said:
You can say having more threads helps in “real world scenarios” if you are running background tasks, but that’s a separate issue.

thats crazy and you know it, nobody here is running a single task at a time if they don't have to. lets get real real, multi-tasking was invented before the multi core processor

Like rly Im in an intel thread and nobody here understands the point of the E cores? lol???

actually on even more thought, I wanna call this bluff

Enough people in this very thread have expressed wishes that intel would have shipped a 12p core product instead of 8+16. Why would that be if 16t were enough? Or maybe most people here already see the implicit benefit of having 12 tightly knit cores instead of having a bunch of threads jumping around. Almost like intel saw the same issue and thats why there are so many e cores now, so that the 8c cluster of P cores can act at full tilt without issue. Same thing would happen with 12p cores only but perhaps not even as good.

Win2012R2 · May 2, 2025

dr1337 said:
Sure in an ideal world 10ghz processors would be a better focus for intel

They've already been there.

LightningZ71 · May 2, 2025

I still haven't seen anything that makes me believe that any non-professional or non-prosumer user needs anything more than 4 cores optimized for maximum single thread performance and a fleet of light weight cores to handle background tasks. Heck, I maintain a fleet of Alder Lake 2+8 core laptops and I haven't had a single user come to me with a performance issue that wasn't solved by moving closer to a WAP or rebooting since we got them.

511 · May 2, 2025

LightningZ71 said:
I still haven't seen anything that makes me believe that any non-professional or non-prosumer user needs anything more than 4 cores optimized for maximum single thread performance and a fleet of light weight cores to handle background tasks. Heck, I maintain a fleet of Alder Lake 2+8 core laptops and I haven't had a single user come to me with a performance issue that wasn't solved by moving closer to a WAP or rebooting since we got them.

Video Games(8C16T seems to be fine)
3D rendering?
Game Dev with Unreal Engine?
Compression/Decompression (100s of GB of data )

Schmide · May 2, 2025

gdansk said:
Poor unfortunate C++ developers abusing Boost

Note a fair amount of the usable boost stuff has moved into the std library (c++17+ ex filesystem)

dullard · May 2, 2025

LightningZ71 said:
I still haven't seen anything that makes me believe that any non-professional or non-prosumer user needs anything more than 4 cores optimized for maximum single thread performance

511 said:
Video Games(8C16T seems to be fine)
3D rendering?
Game Dev with Unreal Engine?
Compression/Decompression (100s of GB of data )

@511 I guess we have vastly different views of professional and prosumer users. I don't know too many casual users that are doing much 3D rendering, game development, and frequent compression/decompression of 100s of GB of data. To me those exactly summarize professional and prosumer users. I believe that LightningZ71 was referring to office workers on Word/Excel, our parents on Facebook doom scrolling, kids doing homework, people watching a movie, etc.

511 · May 2, 2025

dullard said:
@511 I guess we have vastly different views of professional and prosumer users. I don't know too many casual users that are doing much 3D rendering, game development, and frequent compression/decompression of 100s of GB of data. To me those exactly summarize professional and prosumer users. I believe that LightningZ71 was referring to office workers on Word/Excel, our parents on Facebook doom scrolling, kids doing homework, people watching a movie, etc.

Oh damn i misread that 🤣 Yeah for those stuff a 2+8 ADL/RPL SKU is fine

Schmide · May 2, 2025

LightningZ71 said:
I still haven't seen anything that makes me believe that any non-professional or non-prosumer user needs anything more than 4 cores optimized for maximum single thread performance and a fleet of light weight cores to handle background tasks. Heck, I maintain a fleet of Alder Lake 2+8 core laptops and I haven't had a single user come to me with a performance issue that wasn't solved by moving closer to a WAP or rebooting since we got them.

Maybe if you clean up your darn headers. Compilers are fully threaded and can take advantage of multiple cores. Go find a medium project and compile it. It will take at least a min if not more. I just recompiled wxwidgets and it took 1:40 on an eight core.

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