Intel Meteor Lake Client Processors to use Arc Graphics Chiplets
by Ryan Smith on February 17, 2022 12:15 PM ESTContinuing with this morning’s spate of Intel news coming from Intel’s annual Investor meeting, we also have some new information on Intel’s forthcoming Meteor Lake processors, courtesy of this morning’s graphics presentation. Intel’s 2023 client processor platform, Meteor Lake was previously confirmed by the company to use a chiplet/tile approach. Now the company is offering a bit more detail on their tile approach, confirming that Meteor Lake will use a separate graphics tile, and offering the first visual mock-up of what this tiled approach will look like.
First revealed back in March of 2021, Meteor Lake is Intel’s client platform that will follow Raptor Lake – the latter of which is Alder Lake’s successor. In other words, we’re looking at Intel’s plans for their client platform two generations down the line. Among the handful of details revealed so far about Meteor Lake, we know that it will take a tiled approach, and that the compute tile will be built on the Intel 4 process, the company’s first EUV-based process.
Now, thanks to this morning’s investor presentation, we have our first look at the graphics side of Meteor Lake. For Intel’s 2023/2024 platform, Intel isn’t just offering a compute tile separate from an IO/SoC tile, but graphics will be their own tile as well. And that graphics tile, in turn, will be based on Intel’s Arc graphics technologies – presumably the Battlemage architecture, what's looking to be the Alchemist architecture.
In describing the significance of this change to Intel’s investor audience, GPU frontman Raja Koduri underscored that the tiled approach will enable Intel to offer performance more along the lines of traditional discrete GPUs while retaining the power efficiency of traditional integrated GPUs. More pragmatically, Alchemist should also be a significant step up from Intel’s existing Xe-LP integrated GPU architecture in terms of features, offering at least the full DirectX 12 Ultimate (FL 12_2) feature set in an integrated GPU. Per this schedule, this will put Intel roughly a year and a half to two years behind arch-rival AMD in terms of integrated graphics feature sets, as AMD’s brand-new Ryzen 6000 “Rembrandt” APUs are launching today with a DX12U-capable GPU architecture.
Past that, we’re expecting that Intel may have a bit more information on Meteor Lake this afternoon, as the company will deliver its client (Core) and server (Xeon) updates to investors as part of their live session later today. Of particular interest will be whether Intel embraces the tiled approach for the entire Meteor Lake family, or if they’ll hit a crossover point where they’ll want to produce a more traditional monolithic chip for the lower-end portion of the product stack. The Foveros technology being used to package Meteor Lake is cutting-edge technology, and cutting-edge tech often has cost drawbacks.
Source: Intel
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dwillmore - Thursday, February 17, 2022 - link
I don't understand the change from Alder Lake/Raptor Lake to Meteror lake/Next Gen. Aren't they already separating the GPU die from the compute die? What's a TileGPU vs teh ARC Battlemage (GPU?)? This is as clear as mud.thestryker - Thursday, February 17, 2022 - link
I don't believe Intel previously officially confirmed whether or not the IGP on Meteor Lake would be its own tile. That's all this article is referring to: Intel is saying that graphics are their own tile. The current IGP and Alchemist core designs are a bit different from each other despite being the same architecture so it seems that everything will be unified with Meteor Lake.whatthe123 - Thursday, February 17, 2022 - link
what are you talking about? alder lake and raptor lake are monolithic, while meteor lake and later are chiplets. could not be more simple, they even have images where you can see the separation of chiplets if you have difficulty reading.dwillmore - Thursday, February 17, 2022 - link
It doesn't show that in the least! The Alder Lake/Raptor Lake 'bar' shows a disjoint white ARC/Alchemist block and a separate blue die which is unlabled. Meteror Lake/Next Gen shows a white ARC/Battlemage block and a separate ARC (tile) GPU/SoC/CPU block (two GPU blocks). Next platform is similar, just changing the names on the white and grey blocks.How does that make it clear that anything is monolithic or discrete?
Exotica - Thursday, February 17, 2022 - link
The meteor lake graphic does show “tile” while the alder lake/Raptor lake graphic has no such definition. Meteor lake is tiled. Predecessor lakes are not.dwillmore - Thursday, February 17, 2022 - link
It says "tile GPU" which is completely different than "GPU tile". Keep in mind that 'tile' already has a meaning within the GPU context.Exotica - Thursday, February 17, 2022 - link
Don’t outsmart yourself.whatthe123 - Thursday, February 17, 2022 - link
it has them segmented off, with SoC down the middle and labeled as tile. it's also been known for years that meteor is tiled. you're confusing yourself by trying to redefine what you're reading instead of just looking at a simple image loldwillmore - Friday, February 18, 2022 - link
So you agree the picture is confusing?whatthe123 - Friday, February 18, 2022 - link
no, how do you get that what I literally typed out "simple image" in my post? I'm starting to understand why you're so confused.