Rumor mill: Rumors circulating last year painted a stormy picture of the development of Intel Meteor Lake processors of the 14th generation. The latest information takes a step forward with regards to Intel’s struggle with transitioning from its current CPU architecture.
The latest rumors about Intel’s 14th-generation processors suggest that the company has canceled Meteor Lake desktop variants. The upcoming series may struggle to match, much less surpass, the Raptor Lake clock speeds.
In November, rumors said that Intel does not plan to release any Meteor Lake processors in 2023. Instead, the company will fill the 2023 product slot with an upgrade of its latest Raptor Lake line with minor performance improvements. Meteor Lake will debut as a series of laptop processors in 2024, along with 15th generation Arrow Lake processors for desktop PCs, which may be followed by the Meteor Lake series of desktop computers.
However, this week, trusted leader @OneRaichu stated that Meteor Lake processors for desktop PCs may not exist. The 14th-generation processors are expected to mark Intel’s transition to a mosaic architecture that is similar to the “chiplet” design that AMD uses for its latest processors, but Intel may struggle to maintain desktop-class performance in transition conditions.
MTL-S seems maybe canceled.🤔
— Raichu (@OneRaichu) December 23, 2022
The good news is that Intel confirms that Meteor Lake will support AV1 hardware encoding. Arc Alchemist’s specialized GPUs were the first to use AV1 hardware encoding, quickly followed by AMD RDNA3 and Nvidia Ada Lovelace GPUs. Processors have been coding AV1 using software for a while, but only the latest GPUs can do this task in hardware.
The new format provides more efficient compression than VP9 or H.264, but, unlike H.265, also does not require royalties. AV1 will help companies and individuals to produce clearer video at a lower cost and more efficiently. Currently, relatively new hardware is required for encoding or decoding, but support for this format is rapidly expanding.
Meteor Lake is supposed to combine the Intel 4 process node on its computing tile with the 3-nm TSMC node on the GPU tile. This series may also have embedded GPUs supporting ray tracing based on Arc Alchemist ray tracing capabilities.
In addition, it is expected that the processors of the 14th generation will switch to a new socket. Raichu suggests that it can support three generations of processors, such as the LGA 1700, which supports Intel processors of the 11th, 12th and 13th generations.
