Intel Core Ultra: A Deep Dive

This week Intel gave lots more detail about its upcoming Core Ultra (aka Meteor Lake) processors. In this brain dump, I cover most of that information :)

[0:00] Intro
[01:00] What is Meteor Lake?
[03:45] CPU Tile in Intel 4: P-cores and E-cores
[05:21] GPU Tile in TSMC N5: Xe-LPG
[10:38] SoC Tile in TSMC N6: LPE-cores and NPU
[21:20] IO Tile in TSMC N6: PCIe 5.0 and TB4
[21:55] Questions I Gave Intel
[22:25] Singulated Die Test and Known Good Die
[23:58] Release Day: December 14th
[25:29] Cat Tax

-----------------------
Need POTATO merch? There's a chip for that!

If you're in the market for something from Amazon, please use the following links. TTP may receive a commission if you purchase anything through these links.

-----------------------
Welcome to the TechTechPotato (c) Dr. Ian Cutress
Ramblings about things related to Technology from an analyst for More Than Moore

#intel #meteorlake #foveros
------------
More Than Moore, as with other research and analyst firms, provides or has provided paid research, analysis, advising, or consulting to many high-tech companies in the industry, which may include advertising on TTP. The companies that fall under this banner include AMD, Armari, Facebook, IBM, Infineon, Intel, Lattice Semi, Linode, MediaTek, NordPass, ProteanTecs, Qualcomm, SiFive, Tenstorrent.

[VarkaTheDragon]

I think maybe you need more 30-minute green screen deadlines to adlib content like this - this was top notch! Great balance of off-the-cuff and detail focused, with all the right post-production fact checking done out of band to not mess with your flow! Keep it up!

[Wobbotherd]

ARC performance integrated on mobile is a BIG DEAL. Even if its just A380 performance, that would be a massive change for laptops.

[spuchoa]

This was the best technical deep dive into Core Ultra (aka Meteor Lake) on YouTube, great work Doctor Ian.

[PEANUTGALLERY]

Oh man, you could’ve done a meetup while at Malaysia. It’d be a banger of a time. We have plenty of hardware engineers here, and I’m sure there are many fans of the channel

[TypeErrorDubs]

The definitive Ian review of a new CPU/system? 🎉🎉

[overthinkingtech]

I think there's a title in there with a meteor dinosaur pun. Something like "Intel's new meteor lake destroys their old chips like the dinosaurs they are." It's probably too wordy.

[coltmarshmallow]

The NPU is cool. I haven't looked at Intel's SDK for it but having delt with redhat and terraform dropping open source support this year and pivoting because of it, that's my only worry is they will turn around later on the attractiveness to work on.

[bobpritham]

I hope Intel EUV gets better over the time to compete with TSMC.

[iq]

The only tech/hardware channel that the guy knows about what he's talking.

[powerpower-rgbk]

13:30 This isn't about yields, rather there simply isn't a GPU die in the package from the sound of it. With the display controller on the SoC die, it may still be able to drive a display but without any sort of 3D acceleration (codecs are still on the SoC die so there could still be some acceleration there). This is an interesting cost/power saving move and curious how the end products will play out here.

More interesting in terms of power consumption is if a system can boot with only the SoC + IO die in the package. This would be horrible for mobile/desktop usage but would be interesting in the embedded sector depending on the power consumption. I just haven't heard of anyone asking this, much less the answer.

19:00 Curious if this NPU works in the same data formats as Intel's AMX extensions found on their larger cores. Similarly if the Xe graphics can leverage the same data structures. The advantage here would be that properly formatted data in memory could be processed by either the CPU with AMX, GPU or NPU. Needing to convert the data structures between styles takes time (latency) and additional power not spent on the raw execution of said data.

The advanced binning techniques are what I was hoping to see. This should be a good leap for mobile users as one of the dimensions Intel bins for is raw power consumption. I do feel for the low end desktop users (with Lunar Lake since Meteor Lake not coming to desktop) that will be getting seemingly the worst of every metric with potentially some units disabled. On the flip side, this should improve the highend desktop a bit as it'll be easier to pair up known good dies that support high clocks. This also likely means the death of the KF line of SKUs at the high end. The phrase you get what you pay for will be in full play here.

[EthelbertCoyote]

Nice to see that Intel still does testing right with the per chip tests

[defeqel]

looks like Intel is getting interesting again

[danchan]

so many corrections edited in, Steve is coming for you!

[esra_erimez]

It is my humble opinion that Pat Gelsinger will be the person to lead Intel back

[XDSDDLord]

I know this isn't a constructive comment, but damn is it satisfying seeing all of these technologies we've been hearing about for so long, all coming together like this.

[shaunlunney]

was waiting for your perspective on it! Lets see intel in the EUV space, looking forward to the Intel TSMC battles ahead!

[tech]

Finally.. someone is taking a serious stab at power efficiency. lately things have had a trend of just *throw more power at it* for performance :/

Just want a desktop CPU/GPU that are not 300+ watts :|

[Kiyuja]

This is so interesting. I wouldnt buy a new CPU right now as I JUST upgraded but this is cool. Rumors say Intel will go really wild next gen and I'm waiting to see what the mad scientists have cooked up again (huge IPC gain, removal of HT, massive efficiency but also reduction in clocks??)

[PEANUTGALLERY]

Ok, about that singulated die sorting, the key idea there I believe is that it ensures only perfectly good dies gets soldered onto the interposer, or that correctly binned dies gets soldered together. After a tile goes on an interposer, that process can’t be reversed. Better testing ensures Intel does join a tile where one memory channel is crippled with a compute tile that can hit really high clocks.

[PeterDrage]

Awesome video, I think Meteor Lake when it comes to Desktop will be the point I finally update my desktop. I just wish it offered more PCIe lanes that I will lose coming from x299.