A few days ago, Intel introduced Meteor Lake, a new generation that represents a huge development in terms of its architecture. Recall that just two iterations ago, Alder Lake also faced an important leap in this sense, but I personally believe that it is even more important, because thanks to the modifications that Meteor Lake represents over its predecessors, the integrated Intel grows exponentially in terms of possibilities.

To give a little context, recall that the twelfth generation Intel Core, Alder Lake, marked the debut of the manufacturer’s chips in terms of hybrid architecture, integrating Golden Cove’s high-performance cores (P-Cores) and Gracemont’s energy-efficient cores (E-Cores) into the same package. With this evolution, the Intel Thread Director was also introduced, the so-called orchestrator, which is responsible for distributing the load between the CPU cores. The change, as I say, transcendental.

However, Both Alder Lake and Raptor Lake stuck to the monolithic chip design, despite the fact that it has become increasingly common to see other IC manufacturers move to the MCM model, popularly known as a chiplet, which provides more flexibility in integrating components into a package. Something that Intel, using its Foveros encapsulation technology, has already started to use a lot with this new generation, which is, however, only announced for notebooks at the moment.

We’ve heard a lot of rumors over the past few months about whether or not there will be Meteor Lake-S, the desktop decks of this generation. And although everything indicated that no, that there would only be a Raptor Lake Refresh between Raptor Lake-S and Arrow Lake-S, today we know that this will not be the case, because in an interview with Michelle Johnston Holthaus, Executive Vice President of Intel and General director of the Client Computing Group Intel will bring Meteor Lake to the desktop in 2024.

In this question, the vice president is asked about Intel’s plans to maintain, as it has done in the past, one family of integrated devices for both desktops and laptops, or if it intends to separate the two, to which he replies that Its intention is to preserve the model of one family per generationwhich would confirm something we’ve long thought, which is that the Raptor Lake Refresh is an exception, not the beginning of a policy change along these lines.

This of course raises a number of doubts which They move around the time of year when Intel will introduce the Meteor Lake-S CPU. Will it be at the beginning of the year together with the Raptor Lake Refresh, allowing both families to co-exist in the market? Will we have to wait for them as a generation replacement until September-October (and what will happen to the integrated ones for laptops in that case)? Or maybe what we’re seeing is a change in the calendar that Intel has been using to launch its integrated generations?