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.)

fastandfurious6 · May 5, 2025

BleedingMoney Inside®

511 · May 5, 2025

Well if you have a leading edge fab business Iike Intel and have outsourced 30% of your wafers you will bleed money AMD gave up on their Fab biz and that was a good decision for them.
Not to mention if your prior nodes are very expensive and they are the majority of volume they just have problems lined up.

MS_AT · May 5, 2025

OneEng2 said:
I have been thinking that code compilation might be one of those tasks as you have pointed out. I have some non-trivial C++ projects as well, but honestly, even those compile pretty quickly .... even when I force a "Build All".

By build all, do you mean you do a clean rebuild or just build everything? As most of sane build systems are leaning heavily on the incremental builds ensuring that you don't rebuild anything that has not changed so in best case scenario only the cpp file that was modified It has then to be then linked once again but depending on the size of the project and linker you use might give different meaning to "pretty quickly"

As I said it's very project specific so it's hard to compare unless we put here much more details or refer to some sort of open source project that can be used as a benchmark.

In general the compilation scales pretty well with number of cores until it doesn't and I don't want to take the thread off-topic by discussing everything that can slow you down, what can be done to optimize the build time, why some of these tricks cannot be universally applied etc.

Schmide · May 5, 2025

btw. I'm more my money is on more midrange machines (mmmmm) At my desk. I have 3 8-core a 12 core and a 16 core. Call me midrange mini Markfw

OneEng2 · May 5, 2025

Schmide said:
The reason developers should get the great machines is they run in debug mode. Optimization takes a back seat. If it runs ok on an above average machine, it should run fine on a lesser machine in release build. Running a profiler is not super taxing but if you're doing it over and over those minutes or even few seconds add up.

I probably wouldn't notice a lesser machine for every day compilation. Even incremental builds on large projects wouldn't be horrible. I'd rather spend the extra few bucks for a good processor so when I evaluate a large project or do updates, it takes less time.

The simple truth is. You can dumb down a faster machine (limit threads and such) but you can't smart up a slower one. A developer machine should at least meet the best metrics a program is being designed for and probably exceed it for good measure.

While there is some wisdom to making developers use an average machine (to avoid the "it works find on my machine" syndrome ), the loss of productivity will always drive managers to purchase the best machines (laughably today that means a laptop) for developers to compile on.

MS_AT said:
By build all, do you mean you do a clean rebuild or just build everything? As most of sane build systems are leaning heavily on the incremental builds ensuring that you don't rebuild anything that has not changed so in best case scenario only the cpp file that was modified It has then to be then linked once again but depending on the size of the project and linker you use might give different meaning to "pretty quickly"

As I said it's very project specific so it's hard to compare unless we put here much more details or refer to some sort of open source project that can be used as a benchmark.

In general the compilation scales pretty well with number of cores until it doesn't and I don't want to take the thread off-topic by discussing everything that can slow you down, what can be done to optimize the build time, why some of these tricks cannot be universally applied etc.

Yea, I meant everything regardless of if it has been touched or not. Generally I only do this on the build machine for a final release step, and this is done using the command line interface and a build script vs the IDE.

I don't think that it is off topic though. Even this use case runs into scalability issues past a certain number of cores. My thought is that the IO becomes the bottleneck in and out of the disk system. Again, a workstation would likely be a better option than a high core count desktop.

The question I am wondering about is are there ENOUGH use cases where a 52 core desktop would be worth the silicon to the OEM and the price tag to the user where the use case would not drive the user to a workstation instead?

OneEng2 · May 5, 2025

reb0rn said:
So now its 6 core is enough, are you ppl for real

Yea, I am a real person.

What do you need more than 16 cores for? I am asking a real question.

511 · Tuesday at 12:54 AM

Except for prosumer/Development use no one should need more than 8 HT Cores or a 6+8 Config in Intel's case.

MS_AT · Tuesday at 2:53 AM

OneEng2 said:
My thought is that the IO becomes the bottleneck in and out of the disk system.

Unlikely, unless you drive the builds from HDDs, and/or you have tiny amount of RAM what neccesities using SWAP file.

reb0rn · Tuesday at 8:44 AM

OneEng2 said:
Yea, I am a real person.

What do you need more than 16 cores for? I am asking a real question.

Any task, more program at same time, etc that can use 16 cores will use 64 and finish the process way faster, if a code can scale to 16 it can scale to 64 threads or more

Hitman928 · Tuesday at 8:57 AM

reb0rn said:
Any task, more program at same time, etc that can use 16 cores will use 64 and finish the process way faster, if a code can scale to 16 it can scale to 64 threads or more

Your last statement is verifiably untrue.

reb0rn · Tuesday at 9:12 AM

Everything other than games I have run that use 16 threads can scale to more is it compiling, some calculations, crypto, encryption, encoding.... there is maybe some that need more optimization but so far in my limited use i seen none

Schmide · Tuesday at 9:58 AM

OneEng2 said:
While there is some wisdom to making developers use an average machine (to avoid the "it works find on my machine" syndrome ), the loss of productivity will always drive managers to purchase the best machines (laughably today that means a laptop) for developers to compile on.

Another thing that justifies above average machines in the developers hands.

Emulation, or moreover platform replication. There are projects were you will have to run your own server, database, or other asset often in an unoptimized state. You will design it, test it, break it, reload it over and over all on one machine.

Though now that I think of it. Developers just need two machines. (Recurse till all the machines are mine)

Hitman928 · Tuesday at 11:52 AM

reb0rn said:
Everything other than games I have run that use 16 threads can scale to more is it compiling, some calculations, crypto, encryption, encoding.... there is maybe some that need more optimization but so far in my limited use i seen none

Many compilations won’t scale that high. Video encoding won’t. I won’t say all because I haven’t tested them all, but many encryption algorithms won’t scale like that either.

OneEng2 · Tuesday at 12:04 PM

Hitman928 said:
Many compilations won’t scale that high. Video encoding won’t. I won’t say all because I haven’t tested them all, but many encryption algorithms won’t scale like that either.

Yea, I don't know the actual number of real world applications that do scale to higher than 16c/32t, but my gut feeling is that most of them that DO are likely good candidates for a workstation vs high core desktop.

reb0rn · Tuesday at 2:01 PM

Why would I pay workstation price if I can get same or almost same for 40%

@Hitman928 Maybe some do not scale but my user case is not limited to one app, my 9 PC are heavy loaded and if the price is right I would rather have 5 PC with 64 core at decent price
more so most multithreaded app just need minor tweak to scale other could be limited by ram or nvme that not the same

OneEng2 · Tuesday at 8:40 PM

reb0rn said:
Why would I pay workstation price if I can get same or almost same for 40%

I am speculating that you can't get "almost the same" in most apps without having the extra bandwidth that the workstation multiple memory channels gives you.

Additionally, I am speculating that for the kinds of applications that DO scale, many will be the kinds of work where the people doing it will be very happy to pay for a real workstation for the added productivity.

We will see next year. If Intel launches a 52 core part in H1 2026, we will see if it sells.... and what price it sells at ...... and how well practical applications scale.

reb0rn · Tuesday at 8:48 PM

It will sell as intel need to make it work so price will be very competitive, its other unknown is how well new process will be, I am mostly interested perf/watt in multithreaded use + avx10

We know we lost any hope that any new intel node just do not compute and have a lots issue, they still have dozen tech that are lead edge and they sure need some luck and to get their fab in order

dttprofessor · Tuesday at 10:55 PM

If ultra300s has 2 computer tiles , it will be 4 channel RAM！IMC is on the computer tile !

coercitiv · Wednesday at 2:37 AM

Meanwhile Intel shaved $100 from the price of Ultra 7:

Intel Updates Suggested Pricing for Intel Core Ultra 200S Series Desktop Processors

Intel has updated its suggested pricing for certain Intel® Core Ultra™ 200S series desktop processor SKUs – enabling better-than-ever combination of price & performance for gamers, creators, and professionals alike: Intel Core Ultra 7 processors (box prices listed) U7 265K - $299 (previously...

community.intel.com

This is what happens when you have extra cores but not the consistent ST performance uplift that users were expecting.

DrMrLordX · Wednesday at 2:44 AM

dttprofessor said:
If ultra300s has 2 computer tiles , it will be 4 channel RAM！IMC is on the computer tile !

Only if the underlying platform provides all the slots and traces for quad channel.

Thibsie · Wednesday at 2:48 AM

dttprofessor said:
If ultra300s has 2 computer tiles , it will be 4 channel RAM！IMC is on the computer tile !

It means it could have, not it will have.

Thibsie · Wednesday at 2:49 AM

reb0rn said:
It will sell as intel need to make it work so price will be very competitive, its other unknown is how well new process will be, I am mostly interested perf/watt in multithreaded use + avx10

Intel is bleeding cash, we'll see if competitive pricing is enough.

coercitiv · Wednesday at 4:13 AM

At this moment, do we have a reliable / fresh source of information on whether the MC is on the compute tiles or the SoC tile? I remember a while ago there was talk about it moving to the compute tile, but in the light of this dual compute tile SKU I find it hard to believe it. Quad channel RAM and distributed memory controller sounds like a very complex and expensive solution for a niche consumer product. Makes very little sense to me, unless this is meant for HEDT / workstation and not consumer.

eek2121 · Wednesday at 6:23 AM

OneEng2 said:
Didn't work for AMD. ST performance was more important to more people.

It absolutely did work for AMD. Ryzen trailed in single core performance for Zen, Zen+, and Zen 2, while leading in core counts. Zen only became a single core beast with Zen 3 and X3D.

coercitiv said:
The same will apply to this 52c NVL-S, when compared to an optimized design it will sacrifice gaming perf for productivity perf. Mem controller stays on SoC tile for a start. The tiles are identical 8+16, in order for a dual tile to perform well in gaming it would need to be exclusive P tile and exclusive E tile. This would also increase MT perf since resulting core count would be something like 12P+40E due to distribution on somewhat identically sized tiles. The obvious problem with asymmetrical tiles would be design cost (financial, manpower, time to market). Ironically AMD is in a better position to execute such a setup with a 12+24 chip but I really doubt they'll do it until Intel has something on the shelves that challenges their 3D cache setup.

AMD’s memory controller is also on the SoC (IO die). Intel is working on stacked cache. Just because you add more cores doesn’t mean single core performance has to suffer. AMD could drop a 64-96 core Threadripper part that hits 5.7ghz if they wanted. They don’t due to targeting the pro/workstation market. We do get 5.5ghz parts, however.

AMDK11 · Wednesday at 10:49 AM

Higher quality image of the ArrowLake structure. You can finally see the details of the LionCove and Skymont core logic.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1919366310816862484

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