Where are the Meteor Lake CPUs? The latest intel from Intel
Meteor Lake or Raptor Lake? 14th gen or 15th gen? Laptop or desktop? We clear up the confusion
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With all this talk of the upcoming Intel 14th gen release date, there’s been a bit of confusion around the nomenclature of the range: are these new CPUs Meteor Lake or something else? 14th gen or 15th gen? Laptop or desktop?
Below we break down everything you need to know, based on the latest current info. 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!
Will Meteor Lake be mobile only?
As of September 19th, Intel have officially confirmed that the new Intel 14th gen laptop range is coming, launching on December 14th, and these are the processors which will be designated Meteor Lake, coming with a completely new disaggregated architecture design that splits the chip into four tiles, each with a different function.
The new 14th gen desktop CPUs however which should be arriving earlier are being referred to as a Raptor Lake refresh, based on an update of the previous architecture.
You can read our Intel 14th gen laptop page for more information about these upcoming mobile processors. We’ll be turning it into a buying guide for the best on the market as soon as they start to come out and we get to look over how they perform.
Will Meteor Lake be faster than Raptor Lake?
In short: no, at least not in terms of CPU-only performance. As PCWorld reported after being giving a preview of the new CPUs at Intel’s Penang factory ‘Intel is targeting the performance of its 13th-gen mobile Raptor Lake chips’. What they’re instead focusing on is power efficiency and integrated graphics performance, seeking to knock the Ryzen 7000 series laptops from the top spot in both these areas – spheres in which AMD mobile CPUs/APUs typically dominate.
This means that although single core and multicore performance will reportedly be similar to Intel 13th gen laptop CPUs, the Meteor Lake processors will manage it with (supposedly) half the power draw, which should translate to much better battery life for your laptops. In terms of integrated graphics performance however, we can expect (if Intel is to be believed) as substantial improvement.
Meteor Lake iGPU performance increase
With Meteor Lake CPUs, Intel are updating their previous Intel Xe/XeLP technology to a new XeLPG integrated graphics core. These will be using tech implemented in the Intel Arc dedicated graphics cards (which they call XeHPG graphics tech), which means these new iGPUs will be capable of Ray-Tracing support (though to what standard is anyone’s guess).
More exciting is that these new Intel iGPUs will support Intel’s Frame generation tech XeSS – which is Intel’s version of DLSS, meaning the cards can leverage this for greater FPS performance in those games that support it, hitting harder than their raw specs would normally permit.
Intel are claiming a doubling of integrated graphics performance over their previous 13th Gen range, and it seems like this is before the use of their frame generation tech (we hope), which could be pretty exciting.
