Intel is rumored to launch its Meteor Lake CPU lineup with Core Ultra 7 & 5 chips first followed by Core Ultra 9 laptops in 2024.
19.09.2023 - 16:21 / pcmag.com / 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.)
Though these new chips have not been explicitly broken out, part by part, in detail just yet, the assumption is that they will arrive first as mobile processors for laptops. A launch date for the first Meteor Lake chips has not yet been shared, either, but Intel did present several deep dives during its recent Tech Tour that touched on the Meteor Lake IGP. And they are a cool tease: The on-chip graphics are another reason that we'll be looking at Meteor Lake when it debuts with a keen and expectant eye. Now featuring much of Intel's Arc desktop graphics architecture, Meteor Lake IGPs promise to significantly boost performance for both gaming and GPU-related work, if Intel's claims hold true.
Without much drastic change, Intel’s integrated graphics technology has been relatively easy to follow over the last several years. Its most recent graphics architecture, called Intel Xe Graphics, was first introduced inside of Intel’s mobile 11th Gen ("Tiger Lake") processor line. Intel then brought that graphics architecture to all of its 12th Gen ("Alder Lake") processors, and it was later carried over to the following 13th Gen ("Raptor Lake") processor line, too.
This architecture was then expanded into Intel "Alchemist" Xe HPG, which forms the basis for Intel’s standalone graphics cards: so far, the Arc A770, the Arc A750, and the Arc A380. It’s important to note that, in many ways, the Xe and Alchemist architectures are the same. But Alchemist has a more robust feature set with dedicated hardware for ray tracing and artificial intelligence workloads, not to mention expanded pools of L2 cache.
Meteor Lake’s IGPs are essentially built on the Alchemist Xe HPG architecture, reworked back into an integrated solution and rebranded as the Alchemist Xe LPG architecture. The most significant difference between the Xe LPG and the Xe HPG designs is the lack of dedicated memory controllers on the Xe LPG, as these IGPs will share bandwidth with the host processor. All other features appear to be intact.
As Intel has used this same graphics architecture, more or less, for several years now, news that it’s back again may come as an
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