Meteor Lake vs Raptor Lake Refresh
We discuss Intel 14th Gen desktop vs Intel 14th Gen laptop CPUs (Meteor Lake)
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So Meteor Lake vs Raptor Lake Refresh – what’s the deal? There’s been a lot of back and forth in terms of rumors about what the new Intel 14th gen CPUs will be called when they release, and what architecture they will be based on – specifically whether it will just be a revamp of the existing 13th gen architecture, or something brand new.
Thankfully, Intel has come forward and confirmed a lot of the leaks and rumors to be true. We now have plenty of information to compare Raptor Lake refresh and Meteor Lake. It’s good then as far as Intel’s 14th gen laptop releases go, we also have quite a lot of confirmed information. Everything’s coming up Aaron!
In short, Intel Meteor Lake CPUs are the laptop processors, whereas the desktop processors are designated as a Raptor Lake Refresh – reflecting the fact that they’re based on the same architecture as the Intel 13th gen Raptor Lake CPUs, but improved. Read below for more in-depth details.
If you’re looking for a proper breakdown of the new desktop CPUs, check out our Intel Core i5-14600K review and Intel Core i9-14900K review that have just gone live!
Meteor Lake vs Raptor Lake FAQs
What is Meteor Lake?
Meteor Lake is the name of the upcoming 14th gen mobile CPUs aka laptop CPUs from Intel. As the company revealed in September to certain select sources like PCWorld, the new range will be based upon a brand new architecture that splits the chip into four distinct tiles, each responsible for a different function: the CPU Tile, Graphics Tile, SOC Tile, and IOE Tile.
The first two of these are fairly self-explanatory, but the SOC tile is designed with two functions in mind: to take onboard low-intensity tasks at maximum energy efficiency, and also to house the NPU (Neural Processing Unit) which is responsible for the enhanced machine learning that will be a feature of the new range. The IOE tile is responsible for various connectivity functions: PCI Express, WiFi & Bluetooth, USB4, Thunderbolt etc.
The whole premise of this design is to maximise power efficiency. You can read more about it in our Intel 14th gen laptop guide.
Also to note is that the Graphics Tile will feature upgraded iGPU tech with Ray-Tracing support and frame generation, not to mention a performance per Watt that is apparently double that of the existing range.
What is the Raptor Lake refresh?
According to Intel, the Raptor Lake refresh is the new Intel 14th Gen desktop CPU range. As the designation suggests, it uses the same architecture as the Intel 13th gen Raptor Lake range, but has various enhancements to improve its performance.
Intel has recently showcased each SKU on it’s website which shows higher clock speeds but the same socket (Intel Socket 1700), process size, and number of cores.
