Discussion Intel Meteor, Arrow, Lunar & Panther Lakes Discussion Threads

[Tigerick]

As Hot Chips 34 starting this week, Intel will unveil technical information of upcoming Meteor Lake (MTL) and Arrow Lake (ARL), new generation platform after Raptor Lake. Both MTL and ARL represent new direction which Intel will move to multiple chiplets and combine as one SoC platform.

MTL also represents new compute tile that based on Intel 4 process which is based on EUV lithography, a first from Intel. Intel expects to ship MTL mobile SoC in 2023.

ARL will come after MTL so Intel should be shipping it in 2024, that is what Intel roadmap is telling us. ARL compute tile will be manufactured by Intel 20A process, a first from Intel to use GAA transistors called RibbonFET.



Comparison of upcoming Intel's U-series CPU: Core Ultra 100U, Lunar Lake and Panther Lake

Model	Code-Name	Date	TDP	Node	Tiles	Main Tile	CPU	LP E-Core	LLC	GPU	Xe-cores
Core Ultra 100U	Meteor Lake	Q4 2023	15 - 57 W	Intel 4 + N5 + N6	4	tCPU	2P + 8E	2	12 MB	Intel Graphics	4
?	Lunar Lake	Q4 2024	17 - 30 W	N3B + N6	2	CPU + GPU & IMC	4P + 4E	0	8 MB	Arc	8
?	Panther Lake	Q1 2026 ?	?	Intel 18A + N3E	3	CPU + MC	4P + 8E	4	?	Arc	12

Comparison of die size of Each Tile of Meteor Lake, Arrow Lake, Lunar Lake and Panther Lake

	Meteor Lake	Arrow Lake (20A)	Arrow Lake (N3B)	Arrow Lake Refresh (N3B)	Lunar Lake	Panther Lake
Platform	Mobile H/U Only	Desktop Only	Desktop & Mobile H&HX	Desktop Only	Mobile U Only	Mobile H
Process Node	Intel 4	Intel 20A	TSMC N3B	TSMC N3B	TSMC N3B	Intel 18A
Date	Q4 2023	Q1 2025 ?	Desktop-Q4-2024 H&HX-Q1-2025	Q4 2025 ?	Q4 2024	Q1 2026 ?
Full Die	6P + 8P	6P + 8E ?	8P + 16E	8P + 32E	4P + 4E	4P + 8E
LLC	24 MB	24 MB ?	36 MB ?	?	8 MB	?
tCPU	66.48
tGPU	44.45
SoC	96.77
IOE	44.45
Total	252.15

Intel Core Ultra 100 - Meteor Lake



As mentioned by Tomshardware, TSMC will manufacture the I/O, SoC, and GPU tiles. That means Intel will manufacture only the CPU and Foveros tiles. (Notably, Intel calls the I/O tile an 'I/O Expander,' hence the IOE moniker.)

 

[SiliconFly]

Allegedly, the 890M is bandwidth starved, so it doesn’t scale much higher than it’s performance at 30W, even if you give it more juice.

👍

Long back, I was under the impression that Lunar Lake serves a very small (ULP) market not meant for the majority and I was actually more interested in ARL-H. I was totally wrong. LNL is a lot lot more performant & efficient than I imagined. I now think that LNL final may actually be very close to RTX 3050 in graphics performance & M3 in compute. This is way beyond my wildest expectations. For the first time, I may actually buy an ultra-portable (after some reviews).

 

[Ghostsonplanets]

I now think that LNL final may actually be very close to RTX 3050

No.

If it matches the 1650 Mobile, it will be good enough already.

 

[dullard]

There might be some niche ones that do more, but most everything you see in the general public space is very cheap hardware for customer interfacing. They want things that are low cost, reliable, and very easy to fix if necessary. I'm sure there are companies trying to make things happen, but that doesn't mean it will actually achieve market adoption any time soon. Based on history, when it does happen, it will be because there are cheap, reliable solutions that target the use case.

Maybe you're right, we'll see, but I would be shocked if there is anything outside of maybe of foot note of results from companies buying LNL to drive AI kiosks.

It might not be Lunar Lake that is the big driver, but AI is coming to kiosks in a big way. Kiosks need low power (no discrete GPU), often are independent (might not wire it to a server), for AI tasks needs a good NPU, and depending on the kiosk probably want flashy graphic (decent GPU). Kiosks don't need much other computing power. That exactly describes Lunar Lake and Panther Lake.

Think about checkouts at stores. AI can identify if a user swapped bar codes, skipped the scanner entirely, or even scanned a cheap item when placing an expensive item in the bag. https://www.wavetec.com/blog/self-s...ficial-intelligence-in-self-checkout-systems/

Think about security at airports. AI for bag screening, facial recognition of TSA approved / flagged passengers. AI for assistance and information all around the airport. Etc. Say goodbye to long lines at the check-in, TSA, baggage claim, and so on. https://www.nextgov.com/artificial-...-improve-security-screening-processes/396398/

Think about shopping via voice at drive throughs, fast food, ATMs, etc. (Soda Click was linked in my post above already)

Think about replacing all the roaming employees throughout any store when you can just ask a question anywhere and get an AI answer.

These are not just random ideas, these are products coming to market now and very soon.

 

[dullard]

Brett @ UFD Tech says 30W Lunar Lake beats the latest 54W Ryzen AI 9 HX in graphics!

Doesn't add up! Or is Battlemage that good?

That is what the Golden Pig leak states. Timespy gives 30 W Lunar Lake 4150 points and 54 W Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 gets 4221 points. It is a 1.7% win for AMD over the preliminary Lunar Lake but at almost double the power. The 50 W RTX 3050 gets 4487 Timespy points, which again is a win (8%), but not much of a win for a higher powered discrete GPU.

 

[ondma]

That is what the Golden Pig leak states. Timespy gives 30 W Lunar Lake 4150 points and 54 W Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 gets 4221 points. It is a 1.7% win for AMD over the preliminary Lunar Lake but at almost double the power. The 50 W RTX 3050 gets 4487 Timespy points, which again is a win, but not much of a win for a higher powered discrete GPU.

Artificial benchmarks are not necessarily indicative of gaming performance though. Intel is notorious for having poor drivers for games, although they seem to be devoting more resources to this as their gpus become more competitive.

 

[Hitman928]

It might not be Lunar Lake that is the big driver, but AI is coming to kiosks in a big way.

Think about checkouts at stores. AI can identify if a user swapped bar codes, skipped the scanner entirely, or even scanned a cheap item when placing an expensive item in the bag. https://www.wavetec.com/blog/self-s...ficial-intelligence-in-self-checkout-systems/

Think about security at airports. AI for bag screening, facial recognition of TSA approved / flagged passengers. AI for assistance and information all around the airport. Etc. Say goodbye to long lines at the check-in, TSA, baggage claim, and so on. https://www.nextgov.com/artificial-...-improve-security-screening-processes/396398/

Think about shopping via voice at drive throughs, fast food, ATMs, etc. (Soda Click was linked in my post above already)

Think about replacing all the roaming employees throughout any store when you can just ask a question anywhere and get an AI answer.

These are not just random ideas, these are products coming to market now and very soon.

There are already products for most of these things, but unfortunately (or fortunately?) they all suck right now. Kroger's tried AI monitoring at self checkout a couple of times now and has failed miserably. McDonald's tried to roll out AI backed ordering for drive through but that crashed and burned too. I'm sure this stuff will get better over time but it's not there yet. Maybe by the end of the decade it will start to become more common place as software gets better and hardware gets cheaper.

 

[dullard]

There are already products for most of these things, but unfortunately (or fortunately?) they all suck right now. Kroger's tried AI monitoring at self checkout a couple of times now and has failed miserably. McDonald's tried to roll out AI backed ordering for drive through but that crashed and burned too. I'm sure this stuff will get better over time but it's not there yet. Maybe by the end of the decade it will start to become more common place as software gets better and hardware gets cheaper.

Generally none of that was what we now call AI. But instead coding programmed by people hoping to appear artificially intelligent. Your examples are 5-year old technology: they certainly didn't have the newer AI models or NPUs to run them (Kroger's started in 2020).

 

[RichUK]

Think I might need to upgrade to Arrow Lake from my trusty 7700k.

 

[Hitman928]

Generally none of that was what we now call AI. But instead coding programmed by people hoping to appear artificially intelligent. Your examples are 5-year old technology: they certainly didn't have the newer AI models or NPUs to run them (Kroger's started in 2020).

Both McDonald's and Kroger programs were running earlier this year. Yes, it was probably based on "AI" tech that was a couple of years old, but that's how development works. If they want to use hardware and models coming out today, it will be at least a couple of years before you see it in retail stores and then it will need to probably have a second iteration at least and come down in cost before market wide deployment. Maybe I'm being pessimistic, but I just don't see it working well at scale before the end of the decade.

 

[Thunder 57]

Self checkouts are already being phased out and I doubt AI can save them. They were a terrible idea to begin with.

 

[SiliconFly]

No.

If it matches the 1650 Mobile, it will be good enough already.

Brett's video shows that it's actually well ahead of RTX 2050 & closer to RTX 3050 mobile already. There's a chance LNL final may catch up to 3050 considering these are beta drivers and final drivers will have further performance optimizations.

This changes the game. I never thought an ultra-portable laptop will actually be replacing lower-end and mid-range gaming laptops. And yes, Intel needs to work on their drivers, but it's already pretty good with tons of performance and stability improvements compared to the ones they had last year. Very stable and good. i.e, this time they might actually have a very good product during launch.

 

[Ghostsonplanets]

Brett's video shows that it's actually well ahead of RTX 2050 & closer to RTX 3050 mobile already. There's a chance LNL final may catch up to 3050 considering these are beta drivers and final drivers will have further performance optimizations.

Based entirely on TimeSpy benchmarks, which is an area where Intel iGPs always overperformed when compared to real world performance.

RTX 3050 is a 2048 ALUs GPU with modern uArch, 128-bit memory bus and 112GB/s bandwidth, while running at 1.X GHz clocks (Depeding on TGP).

Lunar Lake is also a modern uArch wirh 1024 ALUs and running at 1.8 to 2GHz, with 128-bit shared UMA giving it ~137GB/s.

it's very unlikely that with two contemporary gpus, the one which is half as wide will match the wider one. Unless there's a serious clock difference between each other.

I don't doubt Lunar Lake top SKU can come close to some low-end RTX 2050/3050 30W SKUs that are clocked at <1GHz. But it's very unlikely that it will consistently outperform it. And this will be even more unfavorable for LNL when compares to higher TGP RTX 3050/2050.

Anyway, I'd argue it's better to wait and see for Lunar Lake performance in real gaming workloads before getting worked up. Meteor Lake iGPU was also overhyped due to ES TS test and in real world, it consistently match or trails behind AMD 780M solution.

I'm sure LNL BMG IP will be fantastic, but let's wait and see first.

 

[mikk]

That is what the Golden Pig leak states. Timespy gives 30 W Lunar Lake 4150 points and 54 W Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 gets 4221 points. It is a 1.7% win for AMD over the preliminary Lunar Lake but at almost double the power. The 50 W RTX 3050 gets 4487 Timespy points, which again is a win (8%), but not much of a win for a higher powered discrete GPU.

I don't think it's a win in timespy unless Strix Point also had been tested with 16GB 1R RAM.

 

[FlameTail]

So now we are fungling with the number of ranks in the memory?

 

[Henry swagger]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1806613235061101017

2 extra cores on arrow lake s are crestmont ? 🤔 .. 8+16+2

 

[Ghostsonplanets]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1806613235061101017

2 extra cores on arrow lake s are crestmont ? 🤔 .. 8+16+2

S or H? Pretty sure Arrow Lake Desktop isn't supposed to feature any LPE core. ARL-H is said to have 2x Crestmont LPE as the SoC tile is mostly unchanged from MTL.

 

[Henry swagger]

S or H? Pretty sure Arrow Lake Desktop isn't supposed to feature any LPE core. ARL-H is said to have 2x Crestmont LPE as the SoC tile is mostly unchanged from MTL.

Desktop arrow lake will have lp cores according to mild

 

[Geddagod]

So? It does so at a much higher clock. What part of that don’t you get? How can Lunar be more efficient than M3?

Also the M3 scores much higher than 3100. It does around ~3200.

Well, just because something can clock lower with higher IPC doesn't always mean it will be more efficient... just look at GLC vs Zen 3. But ye, I agree, I highly, highly doubt LNC will be more efficient than a M3 P-core.
Perhaps I will be surprised though

 

[DavidC1]

Artificial benchmarks are not necessarily indicative of gaming performance though. Intel is notorious for having poor drivers for games, although they seem to be devoting more resources to this as their gpus become more competitive.

That's true, but Battlemage adds instructions and fixes things that will improve real world gaming performance which the drivers have been hard at work mitigating them.

-Execute Indirect: Used in UE5 games, went from software to hardware
-Fast Clear
-SIMD16 for better compatibility:

When we launch you're gonna see dramatically better game compatibility.

-Another command, Fast Clear, is now supported in the Xe2 hardware, rather than having to be emulated in software as it was on Alchemist.
-Alongside further improvements for bandwidth and, importantly, utilisation.

3DMark benchmarks are not a terrible tool for showing overall performance but can be very limiting.

For example, in 3DMark, for iGPUs it usually doesn't get playable frame rates. Games have to. Therefore, it favors Alchemist where the utilization is only high enough under very demanding workloads. Games by virtue of needing playable frame rates, the demands are lower, thus you lose some performance.

 

[DavidC1]

Seriously, numbers like these are utterly insane. This is MTL-U vs LNL package power... Which includes memory for LNL but not for MTL. I would genuinely be extremely surprised if LNL loses to SDXE on battery life, to be frank.

That's a huge selling point for thin and light devices.

Let's recap:
-Local Video Playback 1080P: 532mW

Kabylake, which is actually quite efficient in terms of battery life requires something like 0.9W for SoC and 0.6W for DRAM. The total system consumption on my laptop is 4.3W at 720P.

Based on that result, the system power consumption on my laptop would drop from ~4.3W to 3.2W. This assumes that other parts of the system does not improve, because I can tell you, controlling SoC power affects other parts of the system.

I can only get 0.5W for the SoC if the CPU load is near zero and nothing running. Of course DRAM is not zero.

690mW on Netflix 1080p.

Haswell might be repeated, again: https://www.trustedreviews.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/54/2013/06/haswell-battery-large-3.jpg

The only negative for Lunarlake seems to be they are a one-off chip. I hope they can carry that on for Pantherlake, but I'm not so sure.

 

[TESKATLIPOKA]

So you have no use case, can't think of one, yet you specifically pick out one and only one of the multithreaded benchmarks in the leak to talk about? It just isn't a very relevant benchmark for this CPU's target market. I can't wait to play Cinebench on a MSI Claw! https://videocardz.com/newz/msi-con...graded-to-lunar-lake-no-plans-for-amd-version

You are the only one who is nitpicking about me using Cinebench.

Cinebench is widely used in reviews of laptops, It will be also used when Lunar Lake will be released, so I find It ridiculous how you claim It's useless for this SoC.
With this argument of yours I can pretty much claim that every single mobile CPU(SoC, APU), unless they have >80W TDP shouldn't be tested in CB, because they are not aimed for rendering etc.
In my books, Cinebench is a good test of nT performance and easy to find results, that's why I chose it and It doesn't matter If I use my laptop for rendering or not, It still shows nT performance, which can be compared.

I originally didn't bother with GeekBench MT for two reasons, I don't really consider It a good bench and the second is that for some reason 17W LNL has higher score than the 30W one.

But ok, If you are unhappy with Cinebench because LNL is behind in performance, so here It is:
LNL 17W vs 8840U 15W Link
5.4 MT 8805 vs 5.5MT 8205
LNL 30W vs 8840U 28W
5.4MT 8653 vs 5.5MT 10014
Wins at 17W but loses at 30W against Zen4.
BTW, not sure, what is the difference in 5.4 vs 5.5 version of Geekbench.

P.S. I honestly don't care what you will use your MSI Claw for

 

[TESKATLIPOKA]

Yes, there is value to Cinebench data. It is just of less importance to other benchmarks. I'm mostly wondering why he picked the one benchmark of all leaks that shows Lunar Lake in the worst light with the least likely use case to make his conclusion.

I would have used multiple benchmarks and multiple chips at the very least before concluding here (even if just based on preliminary data).

Then please tell me which benchmark of these should I use for nT, so you won't be unhappy about my choice?
Geekbench? BS result between 17w vs 30W, but even so I compared It in my above post.
Is there anything else for nT performance?

LNL 17W vs 30W

 

[poke01]

The only negative for Lunarlake seems to be they are a one-off chip. I hope they can carry that on for Pantherlake, but I'm not so sure.

Panther Lake U won’t be like Lunar Lake sadly. At least the roadmap doesn’t suggest a 1:1 successor.

 

[TESKATLIPOKA]

That is what the Golden Pig leak states. Timespy gives 30 W Lunar Lake 4150 points and 54 W Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 gets 4221 points. It is a 1.7% win for AMD over the preliminary Lunar Lake but at almost double the power. The 50 W RTX 3050 gets 4487 Timespy points, which again is a win (8%), but not much of a win for a higher powered discrete GPU.

It would have been more interesting If they compared Strix at 30W.
Not a bad performance in TimeSpy, but I still think RTX 3050 will be faster in games, thanks to much higher BW and let's nor forget Ampere is older tech.

 

[Ghostsonplanets]

Desktop arrow lake will have lp cores according to mild

Then he's very wrong. Unless he got some hot off the press info