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

[Tigerick]

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	8 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 (20A)	Arrow Lake (N3B)	Arrow Lake Refresh (N3B)	Lunar Lake	Panther Lake
Platform	Mobile H/U Only	Desktop Only	Desktop & Mobile H&HX	Desktop Only	Mobile U Only	Mobile H
Process Node	Intel 4	Intel 20A	TSMC N3B	TSMC N3B	TSMC N3B	Intel 18A
Date	Q4 2023	Q1 2025 ?	Desktop-Q4-2024 H&HX-Q1-2025	Q4 2025 ?	Q4 2024	Q1 2026 ?
Full Die	6P + 8P	6P + 8E ?	8P + 16E	8P + 32E	4P + 4E	4P + 8E
LLC	24 MB	24 MB ?	36 MB ?	?	8 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.)

 

[H433x0n]

They're not silent at all.

Publicly they are silent. The only material we have is a single leaked slide from MLID. Which makes sense since usually performance and architectural details aren’t announced well in advance of public release.

 

[Timorous]

Is AMD’s silence on Zen 5 deafening? I don’t even recall AMD making a ton of proclamations about Zen 1 pre official release. You’re reading into this what you want to fit a narrative. The last thing Intel needs to do is hype something up, their best bet is to follow what they did with EMR.

Don't be daft. When you are consistently delivering and have the current best product you don't want to be shouting about the next hotness because you don't want to be competing with yourself. Also Intel are steadily losing market share so they have something they want to hold on to and if ARL was another Conroe moment then it would be worth talking about.

EMR does not look that special, competes with 64 core Genoa at best. What is there to shout about? They have reached performance parity with a year old 4th/5th tier part while using around 200W more power in the process. It is not a win tbh, it is just sucking less.

 

[coercitiv]

I don’t even recall AMD making a ton of proclamations about Zen 1 pre official release.

Here's a video from Aug 2016, AMD launched Zen 1 in Feb 2017

Consumers need not know much beforehand about how good the next gen Intel products are, but stockholders and investors should. Intel needs as much trust capital as they can borrow. When they have something good we will know, they will tell enough for analysts to raise an eyebrow.

 

[adroc_thurston]

Publicly they are silent.

Of course, they have a large lead where it matters.

ARL was another Conroe moment then it would be worth talking about.

ARL is a nothingburger and I've no idea why people even have it on the radar.
LNL is the relevant part since it's revenge-of-IOSF and I like that.

 

[TESKATLIPOKA]

I don't think ARL is about performance. I have a feeling it'll be more like MTL in performance. But I think it's gonna be very efficient.

Then Intel will have a problem. In desktop better efficiency won't make users upgrade to ARL, If the only thing they gain is lower TDP.
ARL will need to provide both higher 1T and nT performance.

It doesn't look like we can expect 6GHz boost, maybe not even 5.5GHz. So ARL needs ~10% higher IPC just to be on par with Raptor, another 5-10% would be considered as an upgrade. This is It for 1T performance.
For nT they will need additional ~4-5 E-cores just to compensate for the missing HT. Of course this is not possible because of clusters, so they have to add 2 E-core clusters with 8 E-cores in total, which will improve nT perf by ~10%.
The final result should be 8P+24E CPU, which should be competitive against 16C32T Zen5, probably loose in 1T but win or at least be on par in nT.

 

[Goop_reformed]

Is AMD’s silence on Zen 5 deafening? I don’t even recall AMD making a ton of proclamations about Zen 1 pre official release. You’re reading into this what you want to fit a narrative. The last thing Intel needs to do is hype something up, their best bet is to follow what they did with EMR.

Well obviously they are only silent to you, the rest however hmmmm

 

[Goop_reformed]

Then Intel will have a problem. In desktop better efficiency won't make users upgrade to ARL, If the only thing they gain is lower TDP.
ARL will need to provide both higher 1T and nT performance.

It doesn't look like we can expect 6GHz boost, maybe not even 5.5GHz. So ARL needs ~10% higher IPC just to be on par with Raptor, another 5-10% would be considered as an upgrade. This is It for 1T performance.
For nT they will need additional ~4-5 E-cores just to compensate for the missing HT. Of course this is not possible because of clusters, so they have to add 2 E-core clusters with 8 E-cores in total, which will improve nT perf by ~10%.
The final result should be 8P+24E CPU, which should be competitive against 16C32T Zen5, probably loose in 1T but win or at least be on par in nT.

Well imho intel can't risk it all for Arrow lake like amd did with zen, if that is the case then if Arrow fails then the whole company goes under. It all boils down to how IF compete with TSMC. If IF is good then it can compensate for the cores. This is just a business decision.

 

[cebri1]

Here's a youtube review of a retail Asus UX3405, apparently with all latest updates. Can't really draw any conclusions from the performance benchmarks as I didn't see any definitive statement regarding power levels? But the battery life results are certainly encouraging.

Yeah would have been a great review if we had power levels along with performance results. His benchmarks seem to be a bit on low side but within margin of error, I saw several ZenBooks reaching 2400 points is ST in GB6. But again it's about 2% difference. Very encouraged by the battery life.

 

[Timorous]

I don't think ARL is about performance. I have a feeling it'll be more like MTL in performance. But I think it's gonna be very efficient.

Then it will get clowned. Might be good for super ultra thins and the MS surface devices but that will be about it.

ARL is a nothingburger

Seems that way.

Intel have been so disappointing for a decade or more now.

Their last great arch was Sandy Bridge and Broadwell C was at least interesting but since then it has been a few % here and there with AMD forcing core count increases.

The difference between NV and Intel is so stark and if Intel has executed like NV I suspect AMD would have been sold off because even Zen would not have been enough.

 

[FlameTail]

Might be good for super ultra thins and the MS surface devices but that will be about it.

I think the Snapdragon X Elite will be better than MTL for that purpose.

Seems that way.

Intel have been so disappointing for a decade or more now.

Their last great arch was Sandy Bridge and Broadwell C was at least interesting but since then it has been a few % here and there with AMD forcing core count increases.

MLID is saying he genuinely fears for the future of Intel. Are you guys feeling that way too?

The difference between NV and Intel is so stark and if Intel has executed like NV I suspect AMD would have been sold off because even Zen would not have been enough.

Absolutely. Nvidia is such a titan. Even now they are in such a dominant position that they have the capability to make Radeon dGPUs go extinct. But then they'll get blasted by antitrust for monopolistic practices; so of course they are not gonna do that. There were some rumours that Nvidia will enter the PC CPU space:

Exclusive: Nvidia to make Arm-based PC chips in major new challenge to Intel

Nvidia dominates the market for AI computing chips. Now it is coming after Intel’s longtime stronghold.

www.reuters.com

This could create a very interesting arena. Historically, Intel used to make only CPUs, Nvidia made only GPUs, and AMD made both.

Now it seems all 3 are going to be making both CPUs and GPUs.

 

[Timorous]

MLID is saying he genuinely fears for the future of Intel. Are you guys feeling that way too?

Intel have a future of course but they won't be in as dominant a position as they were so they are going to need to be more flexible which will take some re structuring.

They will no longer be able to release products and tell customers to take it or have nothing because AMD, NV and others will provide the need and now they are far more established in that space there is trust that AMD, NV and others can provide it.

 

[Henry swagger]

Intel have a future of course but they won't be in as dominant a position as they were so they are going to need to be more flexible which will take some re structuring.

They will no longer be able to release products and tell customers to take it or have nothing because AMD, NV and others will provide the need and now they are far more established in that space there is trust that AMD, NV and others can provide it.

Intel still has 80% market share.. keep dreaming

 

[Timorous]

Intel still has 80% market share.. keep dreaming

For intel to have 80% market share with these revenue splits suggests they are running with unsustainable margins. Or the 80% number is just tales from your backside.

 

[cebri1]

For intel to have 80% market share with these revenue splits suggests they are running with unsustainable margins. Or the 80% number is just tales from your backside.

Revenue share doesn't mean units and therefore marketshare. Intel can sell more Xeons at lower prices and generate less revenue than AMD selling at higher cost per unit.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Intel's cloud marketshare has dropped dramatically. Xeon is still showing up in datacentre due to firesale prices, but in cloud . . . ? Not so much.

 

[FlameTail]

What's the difference between cloud and datacenter?

 

[SiliconFly]

Then Intel will have a problem...

Looks like they may have a problem with ARL desktop CPUs. 20A might not clock very high cos it's a new node. And LNC bringing in very high single-core IPC uplift sounds unlikely too.

The final result should be 8P+24E CPU...

The only solution is tons of cores. But some old leaks suggested only 8+16 for ARL I think (not sure though). But I don't remember anyone mentioning 8+24 or 8+32 during 2024 launch. It may come in later part of 2025 assuming they even exist.

Also, I remember one leak mentioning RPL-R-R (not kidding). ARL desktop will win in efficiency for sure, but may not offer high performance. Bad for Intel.

But on the mobile front, ARL might comfortably beat the competition in efficiency by a wide margin. Might go toe-to-toe with Apple Silicon easily. On the other hand, mobile performance is still hard to speculate as actual LNC performance is still under wraps.

 

[DrMrLordX]

What's the difference between cloud and datacenter?

Someone could probably define the two sales categories better than I, but cloud sales are typically to clients like Cloudflare and possibly AWS/Azure/etc.

Datacentre/DCG usually encompasses everything else.

 

[SiliconFly]

Seems that way.

Intel have been so disappointing for a decade or more now.

Too soon to say. We need to wait a bit until LNC performance leaks to start appearing. If it offers a 30% ST uplift like some leaks suggest, then they'll be back in the game. Might even become very competitive. Hard to say until we get real performance numbers.

Don't need to wait for long I think. It's been quite a while since is was taped-in. ES should out sooner than we think.

 

[FlameTail]

The leaks say,

ARL = 8P+16E in 2024.
ARL-R = 8P+32E in 2025

 

[mikk]

See my post above, there was nothing on the PCWorld article that the initial review was 2 weeks ago, it is only dated as today. They don’t specifically mention it was a retail unit but they don’t say they received a pre production sample either.

This is all you need:


This review was translated from Swedish to English and originally appeared on pcforalla.se.


Then you have to go to pcforalla.se and check out the publishing date (15th December), this is the first thing you have to do before you can claim retail unit. You can also check the benchmark scores which are identical, it's easy to see if it's new or old. Only the translation is new. And you can see in the original review they say they got it in advance like all other reviewer on day 0 or 1.

 

[tamz_msc]

Asus isn't trustworthy as far as BIOS consistency across different models is concerned. Even with the same display and battery size they can have wildly varying idle power draw between a Zenbook and Vivobook OLED, just to give one example.

 

[Timorous]

Revenue share doesn't mean units and therefore marketshare. Intel can sell more Xeons at lower prices and generate less revenue than AMD selling at higher cost per unit.

You should probably have read what I wrote under the chart.

For intel to have 80% market share with these revenue splits suggests they are running with unsustainable margins. Or the 80% number is just tales from your backside.

 

[Hitman928]

This is all you need:


This review was translated from Swedish to English and originally appeared on pcforalla.se.


Then you have to go to pcforalla.se and check out the publishing date (15th December), this is the first thing you have to do before you can claim retail unit. You can also check the benchmark scores which are identical, it's easy to see if it's new or old. Only the translation is new. And you can see in the original review they say they got it in advance like all other reviewer on day 0 or 1.

Yeah, I shouldn't have to dig through a website in another language to find out it's a translation of an older article. I am glad that you were able to spot that, but to suggest I didn't read the article carefully enough because I didn't go looking weeks back through a Swedish website is ridiculous.

 

[Timorous]

Too soon to say. We need to wait a bit until LNC performance leaks to start appearing. If it offers a 30% ST uplift like some leaks suggest, then they'll be back in the game. Might even become very competitive. Hard to say until we get real performance numbers.

Don't need to wait for long I think. It's been quite a while since is was taped-in. ES should out sooner than we think.

Why would I trust Intel performance leaks? Even if they target a 30% st uplift and that gets leaked their track record is so poor that I wouldn't believe they could achieve it or maybe they do but it is a specific workload or it comes coupled with a significant clock regression.