After months of speculations, Intel has finally and officially confirmed its next-gen 7nm Meteor Lake Client CPUs, which will be heading to desktop and mobility platforms in 2023. The blue team stated that the Meteor Lake will its first and its own 7nm EUV node in volume.
The Intel Meteor Lake lineup will feature a brand new x86 architecture that will use a modular design from the company. The architecture will have a mix-match of different cores, similar to the hybrid approach on the upcoming Alder Lake CPUs, which will feature 10nm Golden Cove and 10nm Gracemont cores.
The new architecture is rumoured to be known as the ‘Redwood Cove’ and based on a 7nm EUV process node. It is designed from the ground up to be an agnostic node that can be fabricated at different fabs. According to sources, the Meteor Lake CPUs may very well say farewell to the ring bus interconnect architecture. There are also rumours that Meteor Lake could be a fully 3D-Stacked design and could utilize an I/O die sourced from an external fab.
Building on the foundation of the integrated Intel Iris Xe graphics in 11th Gen Intel Core mobile processors and based on the same Xe-LP microarchitecture, Intel Iris Xe MAX is the company’s first Xe-based discrete graphics processing unit (GPU). It addresses an emerging need for content creation performance in thin-and-light laptops. (Credit: Intel Corporation)
The upcoming SKU will support the LGA 1700 socket, which is the same socket used by Alder Lake processors. So, we can expect the CPU to support DDR5 memory and PCIe Gen 5.0. We also expect there to be NVMe support but only for the PCIe Gen 4 rather than PCIe Gen 5.
But, since the launch date of the SKUs is still a couple of years ahead, Intel’s partners still have quite a lot of time to figure out new support for this chip. Intel has unveiled that they expect Meteor Lake to be done in around Q2 2021.
