Intel will launch Meteor Lake on December 14th — this is Intel’s Core Ultra

For many months, Intel has spared no opportunity to remind us that its Meteor Lake chips would be the ones to watch — its first CPU with different chiplets for each component; its first on its Intel 4 process node; its first with a dedicated AI coprocessor inside. Today, Intel is revealing a whole lot more.

Meteor Lake will “launch” on December 14th, the company now says, as the most power-efficient client processor the company’s ever made — and with up to twice the graphics performance, a “low power island” that can run tasks independently, and hooks into Microsoft Windows to intelligently control the new chips.

In no particular order, here are the highlights of Intel’s Core Ultra — because yeah, this one’s not called a Core i7.

With Meteor Lake, Intel will join its peers in crafting computer chips out of Lego-like building blocks — where the “CPU” and “GPU” aren’t just separate components on the same chip, for example, but actually separate pieces of silicon printed at different sizes and grafted together. The likes of AMD and Qualcomm have been doing this for a while, but heterogeneous computing is relatively new to Intel.

The downside for you is that only part of Intel’s chip is actually on the company’s bleeding-edge Intel 4 process. The graphics are on TSMC’s 5nm process, and the I/O and new “SoC Tile” are on TSMC N6. But the upside is that companies can choose the best building blocks — and selectively cut off power to the rest.

Right out of the gate, no pun intended, Intel is attempting to use chiplets to radically reduce how much power its processors draw. And it’s doing so by taking some of the “Central” out of CPU.

Instead of a single CPU or display region of the chip, each Meteor Lake has two — one on a “low power island” that can theoretically run all by itself, with its own efficiency CPU core, NPU AI coprocessor, media engine, and memory.

The other processor cores are distributed among a “Compute Tile” on Intel 4 that houses the P (Performance) and E (Efficiency) cores, dubbed Redwood Cove and Crestmont, respectively, plus a separate Graphics Tile on TSMC N5.

Realistically, most people using a computer will invoke the Compute Tile, but Intel wants to heat up the chip as little as it can, with an enhanced “Thread Director” that only pushes work to higher-power cores after it’s tried the lowest-power ones first:

That goes for the AI coprocessor, too — which Windows can natively see and monitor in the Task Manager, by the way.

Since “Media” is separated from “Graphics,” integrated encoding and decoding of video could theoretically happen without hitting the graphics tile at all. “An example of this is the addition of hardware support for the AV1 film grain feature, which was previously executed with GPU shaders,” writes Intel.