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

[Tigerick]

Wildcat Lake (WCL) Preliminary Specs

Intel Wildcat Lake (WCL) is upcoming mobile SoC replacing ADL-N. WCL consists of 2 tiles: compute tile and PCD tile. It is true single die consists of CPU, GPU and NPU that is fabbed by 18-A process. Last time I checked, PCD tile is fabbed by TSMC N6 process. They are connected through UCIe, not D2D; a first from Intel. Expecting launching in Q2/Computex 2026. In case people don't remember AlderLake-N, I have created a table below to compare the detail specs of ADL-N and WCL. Just for fun, I am throwing LNL and upcoming Mediatek D9500 SoC.

		Intel Alder Lake - N	Intel Wildcat Lake	Intel Lunar Lake		Mediatek D9500
Launch Date		Q1-2023	Q2-2026 ?	Q3-2024		Q3-2025
Model		Intel N300	?	Core Ultra 7 268V		Dimensity 9500 5G
Dies		2	2	2		1
Node		Intel 7 + ?	Intel 18-A + TSMC N6	TSMC N3B + N6		TSMC N3P
CPU		8 E-cores	2 P-core + 4 LP E-cores	4 P-core + 4 LP E-cores		C1 1+3+4
Threads		8	6	8		8
Max Clock		3.8 GHz	?	5 GHz
L3 Cache		6 MB	?	12 MB
TDP		7 W	Fanless ?	17 W		Fanless
Memory		64-bit LPDDR5-4800	64-bit LPDDR5-6800 ?	128-bit LPDDR5X-8533		64-bit LPDDR5X-10667
Size		16 GB	?	32 GB		24 GB ?
Bandwidth			~ 55 GB/s	136 GB/s		85.6 GB/s
GPU		UHD Graphics		Arc 140V		G1 Ultra
EU / Xe		32 EU	2 Xe	8 Xe		12
Max Clock		1.25 GHz		2 GHz
NPU		NA	18 TOPS	48 TOPS		100 TOPS ?

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.

 

[mvprod123]

Oh god! This is so fake! You do realize that the 14900HX GB6 scores that guys is showing is completely fake! Also, it's powered by a 4090 which not just gently crushes the macbook, but makes it lick the boots in gaming! You just compared a gaming monster with an expensive piece of fashion accessory.

Nice copium🤣

 

[mvprod123]

Who are you parodying?

Could it be him?

 

[coercitiv]

Oh god! This is so fake!

I have major issues with this reviewer, there's plenty of scores and behavior that make little sense on the Razer system (though maybe they're really that bad at setting up the OS and TB). With that caveat out of the way, you REALLY need to watch this segment of the video where he runs Visual Studio natively on the x86 Razer and emulated in Parallels on the ARM Mac. Here it is timestamped so you just need to click and brace for impact:

The Mac runs VS faster in a VM than the Razer does natively.

 

[511]

I have major issues with this reviewer, there's plenty of scores and behavior that make little sense on the Razer system (though maybe they're really that bad at setting up the OS and TB). With that caveat out of the way, you REALLY need to watch this segment of the video where he runs Visual Studio natively on the x86 Razer and emulated in Parallels on the ARM Mac. Here it is timestamped so you just need to click and brace for impact:

The Mac runs VS faster in a VM than the Razer does natively.

It can come down to power profiles as well if so many results are bad

 

[coercitiv]

It can come down to power profiles as well if so many results are bad

It does not change the fact that VS runs very well on the Mac, which is the most relevant part considering the current conversation in this thread.

 

[poke01]

It can come down to power profiles as well if so many results are bad

He’s running all the benchmarks unplugged on both laptops. Make sense why the Razer is so slow.

 

[511]

It does not change the fact that VS runs very well on the Mac, which is the most relevant part considering the current conversation in this thread.

Like i said can be due to power profiles and the 14900K doesn't have the headroom to stretch it's leg being power limited

 

[511]

He’s running all the benchmarks unplugged on both laptops. Make sense why the Razer is so slow.

Ahh that makes sense even RTX 4090 will be slow than

 

[511]

Early Intel Nova Lake CPU "Test Chip" Spotted, The Next-Gen Mainstream Consumer Platform

Intel's next-gen Nova Lake CPUs have been spotted within the shipping manifests at NBD.ltd and seem to hint at a smooth development cycle.

wccftech.com

Nova Lake on shipping manifest already

 

[igor_kavinski]

The Mac runs VS faster in a VM than the Razer does natively.

I noticed that in Excel also when I ran the overclock.net Excel benchmark sheet on the M1. The CPU is a monster when it comes to crunching through large amounts of data. But using normal stuff, like even browsing, I didn't feel much difference. It just felt ok. Nothing extraordinary. No feeling like things are happening at light speed.

 

[Gideon]

I noticed that in Excel also when I ran the overclock.net Excel benchmark sheet on the M1. The CPU is a monster when it comes to crunching through large amounts of data. But using normal stuff, like even browsing, I didn't feel much difference. It just felt ok. Nothing extraordinary. No feeling like things are happening at light speed.

Because actual browsing usually isn't all that much CPU limited. You have to take into account the networking speed, your local wifi setup, etc.

Even when doing everyday web-developing tasks (thus running servers straight from your machine bypassing net) there is very little difference between my zen 3 based 6850U and M1 Pro mac. Basically modern CPUs are good enough to not be the biggest bottleneck.

That said, once I throttle the CPU under chrome devtools "Performance" tab (either 4x or 6x slowdown), thus making the CPU the bottleneck, I do notice a difference between the two. A 6x slowed down mac is certainly faster, particularily on poorly optimised single-page apps running dev-mode. It's not that the Ryzen is unusable or anything (even at those super-slow settings), but it's most certainly slower.

Browsers and javascript interprers really do like lower clocked and wide CPU designs (or perhaps it's just the 16K pages).

 

[511]

x86 is held by backward compatibility 🤣

 

[SiliconFly]

.

 

[perry mason]

Really?

For giggles, I ran Speedometer on Edge on Win 11 through Parallels and achieved a score of 35. This was with 80+gb RAM utilized by other apps at the same time (hundreds of browser tabs, productivity software, but spreadsheets, tools out the wazoo, a remote session, etc).

Now the native Safari score was in the mid-40’s, but that’s a faster browser so it’s not an apples to apples comparison. Perusing online, some desktop 14900k’s without special tuning can struggle to hit a score of 35. Not bad for virtualization!

 

[Doug S]

x86 is held by backward compatibility 🤣

x86 only still exists because of backwards compatibility.

 

[OneEng2]

He’s running all the benchmarks unplugged on both laptops. Make sense why the Razer is so slow.

Well of course. All programmers compile on battery! 🤣

 

[Schmide]

I have major issues with this reviewer, there's plenty of scores and behavior that make little sense on the Razer system (though maybe they're really that bad at setting up the OS and TB). With that caveat out of the way, you REALLY need to watch this segment of the video where he runs Visual Studio natively on the x86 Razer and emulated in Parallels on the ARM Mac. Here it is timestamped so you just need to click and brace for impact:

The Mac runs VS faster in a VM than the Razer does natively.

Note: If you look at the two visual studios one has been used as shown by the Older option under the open recent and one is most likely a fresh install as that is missing. The mac may be faster but that dude's testing is flawed and anecdotal. .net projects have a lot of dependencies outside of visual studio and will cache templates as they are built.

 

[DZero]

x86 only still exists because of backwards compatibility.

And for AMD currently. If AMD was dead, Intel would pull an Itanium on x86

 

[511]

And for AMD currently. If AMD was dead, Intel would pull an Itanium on x86

Like Nvidia has CUDA they want a moat stay afloat

x86 only still exists because of backwards compatibility.

That's not true if backward compatibility wasn't a reason they would have modified the ISA to fit their needs like Apple has done

 

[Schmide]

x86 only still exists because of backwards compatibility.

That is hyperbole. It also exists because it will be compatible with future technology.

We are just barely getting graphics cards working with ARM let alone any other platform.

In the same vernacular, it exists because competition isn't there yet.

 

[SiliconFly]

.

 

[poke01]

Oh no. You're gonna make a lot of Nvidia ARM CPU + GPU admirers very unhappy.

hasn’t even happened yet. WoA has zero support for real GPU IP from either NV or AMD. It won’t happen till Q4 2025

(Qualcomm’s current GPUs in PCs even deserve be to called GPUs)

 

[Schmide]

Oh no. You're gonna make a lot of Nvidia ARM CPU + GPU admirers very unhappy.

I have tons of ARM and now that the Jeff Geerling bunch has kind of sorted it out, I will be setting up a GPU on ARM and joining the fray.

 

[Doug S]

That's not true if backward compatibility wasn't a reason they would have modified the ISA to fit their needs like Apple has done

They never had that option, because if they had replaced x86 there is no guarantee people would have migrated to the replacement. Apple controls the whole stack, and could say "we're going to stop selling x86 Macs" which forced everyone to migrate. It helped a lot that Apple Silicon has been clearly superior to x86, and they had near bulletproof translation technology. But even if ARM Macs were slower and couldn't run x86 stuff that well customers would have had only two choices - migrate to ARM Macs, or drop the Mac platform entirely. Intel doesn't control the OS x86's status depends on, Microsoft does, so they couldn't do it the way Apple did.

But guess what, we don't have to speculate about any of this. Because Intel actually TRIED this, with Itanium. And we all know the result.

 

[511]

They never had that option, because if they had replaced x86 there is no guarantee people would have migrated to the replacement. Apple controls the whole stack, and could say "we're going to stop selling x86 Macs" which forced everyone to migrate. It helped a lot that Apple Silicon has been clearly superior to x86, and they had near bulletproof translation technology. But even if ARM Macs were slower and couldn't run x86 stuff that well customers would have had only two choices - migrate to ARM Macs, or drop the Mac platform entirely. Intel doesn't control the OS x86's status depends on, Microsoft does, so they couldn't do it the way Apple did.

But guess what, we don't have to speculate about any of this. Because Intel actually TRIED this, with Itanium. And we all know the result.

That one is true but Intels Reason for Itanium was to kick AMD out of thier money making moat