Meteor Lake processors will happen successors to Raptor Lakegeneration which, as our regular readers will remember, will be introduced between September and October of this year and which will retain compatibility with LGA1700 motherboards with the 600 series chipset, although they will be accompanied by a new generation of motherboards equipped with the so-called 700 chipset.

We’ve seen a lot of information about Meteor Lake over the past few weeks. We know this generation will use node intel 4 (7nm with a higher transistor density than TSMC’s 5nm node), which will retain a hybrid design with high-performance cores based on redwood bay architecture and highly efficient cores based on crestmont architectureThere are also strong rumors about the possible introduction of a third block of ultra-low-power cores, which would mainly deal with intelligent and fine-tuned management of the various states of the processor.

We also have details about you multi-block structure, a unique design where we will see a block dedicated to the CPU, another SoC (I/O) and another GPU. In the attached picture we can see this structure clearly and visually. Regarding the integrated GPU (iGPU), it is confirmed that Intel will use the Xe (Gen12) architecture, but thanks to a new leak, we have new interesting data about this component and that the iGPU could use the Xe-LPG chip. which would double the number of Raptor Lake iGPU execution units and also come with cores dedicated to accelerating ray tracing.

If confirmed, the iGPU of the Meteor Lake processors will not only be more powerful than the previous generation, but will also be able to speed up ray tracing. An interesting development, though it bears reminding AMD was the first implement dedicated hardware to accelerate ray tracing on the integrated GPU (Radeon 680M and 660M). However, it remains to be seen whether these graphics solutions have enough power to run this technology without drastically reducing performance to an unacceptable level.

As for the XMX units, Meteor Lake iGPUs are expected to completely lack them, and it is entirely believable, because after all, the space at the silicon level is limited, and the maintenance of said units could be due to said limitation. I remind you of that XMX arrays accelerate AI workloadsand are the hardware backbone of Intel XeSS. If all goes well, Meteor Lake processors will launch between late 2023 and early 2024.

In order to upgrade to Meteor Lake processors, we will need to buy a new motherboard because these they will use a different socket labeled as LGA1851. They will only support DDR5 memory (Raptor Lake will support both DDR4 and DDR5) and will use the PCIe Gen5 standard for GPU and storage.