As part of Intel Innovation 2023, the chipmaker shared in-depth details about its new Meteor Lake processors. Intel is making its biggest breakthrough in recent years with its Core Ultra “Meteor Lake” processors. Intel is a completely new...
READING NOW Intel Core Ultra “Meteor Lake” processors introduced: Release date, new architecture and more
Release date of Intel Core Ultra “Meteor Lake” processors
As part of the event, Intel will launch the Core Ultra series processors within the Meteor Lake family on December 14. The Meteor Lake family will first target the mobile side, that is, laptops. The new artificial intelligence chip will give processors unique capabilities.
Although the company did not share product-level details, it unveiled its new 3D performance hybrid architecture. Under the hood, CPU and GPU microkernel architectures, neural processing unit (NPU), Foveros 3D packaging technology, a new approach to power management and new cores emerged. Intel also shared details about its new EUV-enabled Intel 4 (7nm) process node, which the company says delivers the best initial throughput it’s seen in a decade.
The biggest architectural change in the last 40 years
Intel also has to compete against Apple, which is making a disruptive entry into the laptop market with faster, more power-efficient processors. Meteor Lake marks a fundamental rethinking of not only Intel’s processor design, but also its approach to manufacturing its processors. These are the company’s first mainstream chips to use silicon from a rival factory. Intel uses TSMC’s process node technologies for three of the four active tiles in the processor (Intel calls them tiles, which can also be used as a tile design or chip).
Meteor Lake chiplet/tile
Production process
Compute (CPU)
Intel / ‘Intel 4’
Graphics (GPU)
TSMC/N5 (5nm)
SoC
TSMC/N6 (6nm)
I/O
TSMC/N6 (6nm)
3D Foveros
Intel/22FFL (Intel 16)
1st Generation Core Ultra Meteor Lake features
Triple-Hybrid CPU Architecture (P/E/LP-E Cores)
All-new Redwood Cove (P-Core)
All-new Crestmont (E-Core)
Up to 14 cores (6+8) for H/P Series and up to 12 cores (4+8) for U Series CPUs
Intel ‘Xe-MTL’ GPU up to 128 EU
LPDDR5X-7467 and DDR5-5200
Up to 96GB DDR5 and 64GB LPDDR5X
NPU
x8 Gen 5 line for discrete GPU (H Series Only)
Triple x4 M.2 Gen 4 SSD support
Four Thunderbolt 4 ports
We will discuss the details of these later in the article. First of all, we will talk about the details and architecture of these tiles, starting from the basic information.
Meteor Lake architecture
Meteor Lake CPU tile
The CPU tile carries Redwood Cove P-Cores and Crestmont E-cores, and surprisingly there isn’t much improvement in IPC. In fact, although the Redwood Cove cores have some improvements, they do not provide an improvement in instructions per cycle (IPC) throughput. Intel says Redwood Cove resembles what it traditionally calls “tick,” meaning it’s essentially the same microarchitecture and IPC found in the Golden Cove and Raptor Cove microarchitectures used in the 12th and 13th generation Alder/Raptor Lake processors.
Intel has also made some fine touches to accommodate the new tiled design, such as improving memory and cache bandwidth at both a per-core and packet level, which could provide an extra boost in multi-threaded workloads.
The previous generation Gracemont did not have this feature, so it could only use Intel E-cores in quad-core clusters. Now Intel can build smaller dual-core clusters with twice as much cache per core, and it’s taken exactly that approach for its lower-power E-cores on the SoC tile (which use the same Crestmont architecture as the standard E-cores on the compute die). but they are produced in the TSMC N6 process). As with previous generations, each E-core runs single-threaded. Intel has also doubled the L1 cache to 64KB.
Crestmont cores do not support AMX or AVX-512, but they do support AVX10. Intel hasn’t announced full details yet, but we do know that the Crestmont architecture supports the first revision of AVX10. Ultimately, this could allow Intel to add AVX-512 support back to P-core, as a system exists to allow those instructions to be routed solely to P-core. We’ll have to wait to find out whether Intel will fully embrace this approach. Crestmont also supports BF16, FP16, AVX-IFMA and AVX-DOT-PROD-INT8.
Meteor Lake GPU tile
Meteor Lake SoC tile
Intel has moved all media, display, and rendering blocks from the GPU engine to the SoC tile, which helps maximize power efficiency by allowing these functions to run on the SoC tile when the GPU is in a lower power state. Since the GPU tile is also manufactured on the more expensive TSMC N3 node, removing these non-performance-sensitive blocks allowed Intel to make better use of the more expensive transistors in the GPU tile for graphics computing. The SoC tile hosts display interfaces such as HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort 2.1, and DSC 1.2a, while also supporting 8K HDR and AV1 encoding/decoding.
Intel also has a second, lower-power IO Fabric that connects to the I/O tile via another tile-to-tile interface. This IO structure also includes other lower priority devices such as Wi-Fi 6E and 7, Bluetooth, security engines, ethernet, PCIe, SATA and the like.
Intel calls this new structure hierarchy next generation Uncore. Intel has also now added an independent power management controller (PMC) to each tile for independent voltage and frequency control. But these are all connected to two PMCs that control independent structures in the SoC tile, thus creating a more energy-saving power management hierarchy.
Meteor Lake I/O tile
The I/O tile is the smallest of the four Meteor Lake tiles and is manufactured in the TSMC N6 process. This tile houses I/O functions such as Thunderbolt 4 (yes, not 5) and PCIe Gen 5.0. Intel will use different sizes of I/O tiles for different products depending on the amount of connectivity required.
Low power E-core
Neural Processing Unit (NPU)
Some AI workloads can run on both the NPU and GPU simultaneously, and Intel has mechanisms in place that allow developers to target different compute layers based on the needs of the application at hand.
This will ultimately enable higher performance with lower power (8 times less, in fact), which is one of the main goals of using the AI acceleration NPU.
In addition to DIrectML, Intel’s NPU also supports ONNX and OpenVINO, which Intel says offers better performance on its silicon.
The nascent PC AI software ecosystem is now moving faster to adapt to new custom AI engines found not only in Intel’s chips, but also in AMD’s rival Ryzen 7040 series processors, which have their own custom AI engines. Intel plans to bring its NPU to tens of millions of devices by 2025, and we can expect the process to accelerate as AMD makes similar design decisions. Simply put, we will see more native AI applications on devices.
Foveros 3D
Intel manufactures the Foveros interposer using the low-cost and low-power optimized 22FFL process. Intel places four Meteor Lake tiles on top of a passive Foveros 3D interposer/base tile, then the tiles and interposer are fused together with microbump connections that enable high-speed communication and efficient power distribution.
Foveros, on the other hand, is in the early stages of development according to Intel. For now Foveros enables up to 770 microbumps per square millimeter, but this will improve greatly in the future: the Foveros roadmap includes steps of 25 and 18 microns in future designs. Intel says it could even use hybrid bonding interconnects (HBI) to theoretically achieve 1-micron pitches in the future.
At the end of the day, advanced packaging technology is used to mimic the key performance and strength characteristics of a monolithic mold. Intel thinks Foveros is the winning formula that meets these goals.
Foveros technology offers:
Low voltage CMOS interface
High bandwidth, low latency
Synchronous and asynchronous signaling
Low space usage
Intel 4 process process
last words
Intel said its long-awaited Intel 4 process yielded better than expected, signaling that the company has a solid foundation on which to build its next-generation Core Ultra ‘Meteor Lake’ processors. While the addition of the tile/chiplet architecture provides opportunities to reduce costs and increase performance, it is a turning point for the company as it will be the first time Intel will use this type of design. In the next steps to be taken, further development can be expected.
With a massive re-architecture of components, disruptive 3D Foveros packaging technology, and a focus on boosting AI workloads, the new Meteor Lake chips look promising. While Intel is coy about performance metrics and SKU details, it says it delivers a 20 percent improvement in power efficiency, which could give it a better position against rival laptop chips from AMD and Apple, which currently lead in these metrics. Meteor Lake will be released on December 14, 2023.
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