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

[Tigerick]

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.



Comparison of upcoming Intel's U-series CPU: Core Ultra 100U, Lunar Lake and Panther Lake

Model	Code-Name	Date	TDP	Node	Tiles	Main Tile	CPU	LP E-Core	LLC	GPU	Xe-cores
Core Ultra 100U	Meteor Lake	Q4 2023	15 - 57 W	Intel 4 + N5 + N6	4	tCPU	2P + 8E	2	12 MB	Intel Graphics	4
?	Lunar Lake	Q4 2024	17 - 30 W	N3B + N6	2	CPU + GPU & IMC	4P + 4E	0	8 MB	Arc	8
?	Panther Lake	Q1 2026 ?	?	Intel 18A + N3E	3	CPU + MC	4P + 8E	4	?	Arc	12

Comparison of die size of Each Tile of Meteor Lake, Arrow Lake, Lunar Lake and Panther Lake

	Meteor Lake	Arrow Lake (20A)	Arrow Lake (N3B)	Arrow Lake Refresh (N3B)	Lunar Lake	Panther Lake
Platform	Mobile H/U Only	Desktop Only	Desktop & Mobile H&HX	Desktop Only	Mobile U Only	Mobile H
Process Node	Intel 4	Intel 20A	TSMC N3B	TSMC N3B	TSMC N3B	Intel 18A
Date	Q4 2023	Q1 2025 ?	Desktop-Q4-2024 H&HX-Q1-2025	Q4 2025 ?	Q4 2024	Q1 2026 ?
Full Die	6P + 8P	6P + 8E ?	8P + 16E	8P + 32E	4P + 4E	4P + 8E
LLC	24 MB	24 MB ?	36 MB ?	?	8 MB	?
tCPU	66.48
tGPU	44.45
SoC	96.77
IOE	44.45
Total	252.15

Intel Core Ultra 100 - Meteor Lake



As mentioned by Tomshardware, TSMC will manufacture the I/O, SoC, and GPU tiles. That means Intel will manufacture only the CPU and Foveros tiles. (Notably, Intel calls the I/O tile an 'I/O Expander,' hence the IOE moniker.)

 

[igor_kavinski]

This was already done by someone in the forum. It's not the first time we're discussing this topic.

Oh no! Why did he stop at 150W???

@Khato , did you do any further testing at higher PL1 values?

 

[Saylick]

C&C is continuing their MTL investigation, this time with an article on the NPU:

Intel Meteor Lake’s NPU

AI is a hot topic and Intel doesn’t want to be left out, so their Meteor Lake mobile processor integrates a Neural Processing Unit (NPU). Intel internally refers to the NPU as “NPU 3720…

chipsandcheese.com

In summary, it looks like the NPU is of limited use because of the data types it supports (or rather, doesn't support). And of the cases it does support, the NPU offers lower power but not necessarily higher performance. The author seems to think that the iGPU is the better approach here because it's more powerful and more flexible, even at the cost of higher power because there's many situations where you can plug in a laptop these days. That is, until Intel develops a NPU which does cover more use cases with higher performance while continuing to use lower power.

Meteor Lake’s NPU is a fascinating accelerator. But its has narrow use cases and benefits. If I used AI day to day, I would run off-the-shelf models on the iGPU and enjoy better performance while spending less time getting the damn thing running. It probably makes sense when trying to stretch battery life, but I find myself almost never running off battery power. Even economy class plane seats have power outlets these days. Hopefully Intel will iterate on both hardware and software to expand NPU use cases going forward. GPU compute evolved over the past 15 years to reach a reasonably usable state today. There’s something magical about seeing work offloaded to a low power block, and I hope the same evolution happens with NPUs.

 

[Khato]

Oh no! Why did he stop at 150W???

@Khato , did you do any further testing at higher PL1 values?

Negative, didn't see a need to as it'd just continue the same trend. 18W per core is already well into the realm of diminishing efficiency for P cores, and well beyond the maximum the E cores will take.

With respect to SMT, in the 'perfect' workload for it which CB23 is, it's of greatest benefit at the highest power levels. Maybe I'll do a fixed frequency test to confirm actual performance and power increase, but lets assume 1.5x perf for 1.5x power to keep it simple for now. With a fixed 18W per core power limit that means non-SMT runs at the 18W frequency (say 5GHz) while SMT runs at the 12W frequency (say 4.4GHz.) Such results in SMT having a 6.6GHz effective performance, right around 30% above non-SMT. But as power per core goes down to something more like the 4W seen in mobile and servers the V/F curve is nowhere near so punishing, so the benefit of SMT drops.

Basically, my guess is that Intel dropping SMT won't have much of an impact. Improvements in the E-cores are going to negate the losses on the high power desktop side where removal of SMT would otherwise have the greatest impact. Mobile is probably going to come out ahead since the E-cores should be doing most of the multithreading work there anyway. And in server it just draws a clearer line in the segmentation between P-core and E-core based designs.

Oh, and for those concerned about 2 P-cores with ample E-core backup being inadequate for gaming? Don't be. While it's definitely true that many modern games benefit from having 8+ cores they need not be equal in their capabilities to extract that benefit. Most that I've seen still only have 2 'heavy' threads while the remainder are 'light'.

 

[Panino Manino]

C&C is continuing their MTL investigation, this time with an article on the NPU:

Intel Meteor Lake’s NPU

AI is a hot topic and Intel doesn’t want to be left out, so their Meteor Lake mobile processor integrates a Neural Processing Unit (NPU). Intel internally refers to the NPU as “NPU 3720…

chipsandcheese.com

In summary, it looks like the NPU is of limited use because of the data types it supports (or rather, doesn't support). And of the cases it does support, the NPU offers lower power but not necessarily higher performance. The author seems to think that the iGPU is the better approach here because it's more powerful and more flexible, even at the cost of higher power because there's many situations where you can plug in a laptop these days. That is, until Intel develops a NPU which does cover more use cases with higher performance while continuing to use lower power.

Isn't it enough for Windows tasks, CoPilot, etc?
In theory the NPU may be disappointing, but in practice may give the average user some relevant extra battery time.

 

[Ghostsonplanets]

Isn't it enough for Windows tasks, CoPilot, etc?
In theory the NPU may be disappointing, but in practice may give the average user some relevant extra battery time.

Considering it doesn’t support future AI PC Windows features, it doesn’t seem so for MS.

Intel is growing up both NPU and GPU MatMul in next generations. In special GPU with the debut of of XMX on iGPUs starting with Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake.