Piece by piece Confusion that has existed for months about the extent Meteor Lake will have is being cleared up, one of the most important evolutionary leaps in Intel packages for the compatible PC ecosystem. As you may remember, this new generation was introduced last week and, as expected for several months, its ultimate target was exclusively the notebook market and other environments where this type of integrated devices are used, such as mini-PCs and others. similar.

But the surprise came a few days ago when, during an interview with Michelle Johnston Holthaus, Intel’s executive vice president and general manager of the Client Computing Group, It stated that Meteor Lake will arrive on the surface sometime in 2024. Of course, this left a thousand questions in the air, from the basic “when?” where that leaves the Raptor Lake Refresh, which we’ve also been counting on for months to be this generation’s replacement for Intel’s desktop CPUs.

Raptor Lake Refresh is, as its name suggests, an improvement over the 13th generation Intel Core, in which the only relevant change is an increase in operating frequencies (and of course also TDP), while Meteor Lake represents the debut of a new architecture in which for the first time we find an encapsulated MCM design with Foveros technology, an integrated NPU and a number of other new features that make these chips much more attractive. So the Meteor Lake-S option was really tempting.

But no, it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen in the end. How we can read in ComputerBase (in German) Meteor Lake will only be available on Mini-PCs such as Intel NUC and AIO systems (all in one). That said, according to this important clarification, there will be no Meteor Lake-S processors, so the architectural leap will not hit desktops (except the types mentioned) until after the debut of Arrow Lake-S, which is expected. it will be announced between September and October 2024 and may have even more differences as it will be manufactured on the Intel 20A node compared to Meteor Lake which uses the 7nm lithography of the Intel 4 node.

The confusion is given, from what we can infer, v What exactly do we mean by a desktop system?, something that we must admit admits of certain interpretations. So when Michelle Johnston Holthaus talked about this generation coming to desktops, we understand that she was referring to systems equipped with bundles aimed essentially at laptops, as well as some custom SKUs for said platforms. However, the most widespread meaning of desktop equipment is towers and desktops that use S-series processors.