Intel follows Apple's lead with Meteor Lake chip with on-package memory

Intel has made some clarifications to its recent statement regarding the desktop launch of its 1st Gen Core Ultra CPUs codenamed Meteor Lake.

With the launch of the new iPhone 15 Pro models, Apple started using the 'Pro' moniker for its high-end A-series of chips. The A17 Pro is Apple's fastest chip for the iPhone yet that comes with numerous performance and graphical performance gains. With the iPhone 14, Apple separated the A-series chip lineup between the two models. The standard models came with A15 Bionic while the iPhone 14 Pro came with A16 Bionic. This year, Apple continued the upgrade trend with standard models receiving the A16 Bionic while the 'Pro' models came with the A17 Pro chip. We are now hearing that Apple will introduce a dedicated A17 chip for the standard iPhone 16 models next year.

The on/off saga of Meteor Lake for desktops has been settled once and for all. It's been confirmed. Meteor Lake will be coming to desktops.

Intel has confirmed that it will be bringing Meteor Lake CPUs to its desktop platform in 2024 amidst various cancellation rumors.

At Intel Innovation, a two-day event held in San Jose, Calif., the chip maker made official the unveiling of its anticipated "Meteor Lake," its next-generation architecture for client computer processors. We explained, in broad strokes, how Meteor Lake chips, which will debut Dec. 14 under the new Intel Core Ultra brand, are structured, and the general design decisions around the new chips. It's the biggest re-imagining of Intel's processors in decades. But our earlier stories are a mere distillation of many hours of briefings and deep dives, presented by Intel in the run-up to the launch, highlighting the design decisions and the underpinnings of the new silicon.

Intel’s “Meteor Lake” processors for laptops will launch on Dec. 14, but under the umbrella of the new “Core Ultra” brand, according to company CEO Pat Gelsinger. 

The first ever PC handheld I tried out was an Intel-powered device. That was the Project UFO, powered by a 10th Gen Intel chip. Then I tried the One-Netbook OneXPlayer, fitted with an Intel Core i7 1165G7. While both times I enjoyed the concept of a PC handheld, the performance was never quite up to expectation. I've used many more handhelds since and had a much better time—though they've all been powered by AMD silicon. Intel has no major share of the handheld market these days.

Intel has been a genuine player in gaming graphics cards for around a year now; more or less since the release of the Arc A770 and Arc A750 graphics cards. Whether Intel will stick around in the discrete graphics card game has come into question many times since, to the almost certain frustration of those working closely on the products. Culminating in Intel's Tom Petersen telling me «we're not going anywhere» in 2022—before even the launch of Intel's first big gaming graphics cards.

You're going to hear a lot about Meteor Lake in these next few days and weeks; these new chips are some of Intel's most exciting in a good while. I say that even despite their intended use as low power processors in ultra-thin laptops, not even gaming PCs. Some of the new features stuffed into these disaggregated chips could come in handy for the next-generation of gaming processor.

We've heard plenty over the past year or two, in broad terms, about Intel's upcoming roadmap for its silicon, its fundamental changes to its processor branding, and the new lingo (Intel 4, Intel 7) under which it will be referencing its future manufacturing processes. Here in September, Intel is peeling back another layer from the covering over its next-generation processors, code-named "Meteor Lake."

Intel is laser-focused on improving its graphics technology of late. Not only has the company re-entered the graphics card market for the first time in more than 20 years, with its Intel Arc "Alchemist" family of discrete graphics cards, but Intel has also pressed its on-CPU integrated graphics processor (IGP) tech harder than ever. Now, the big chip maker has revealed that it is putting much of that graphics innovation surrounding Arc to work in its upcoming "Meteor Lake" processors. (See our larger explainer for an architectural overview of what's new with the coming Meteor Lake chips.)

When Intel’s “Meteor Lake” processors launch, they’ll feature not just CPU cores spread across two on-chip tiles, alongside an on-die GPU portion, but also the company’s first-ever Neural Processing Unit (NPU) devoted to AI workloads.