That would be a significant disappointment if that turns out to be the case. 6+8 may have a tough time against even Phoenix (believed to be 8p) in a heavily power constrained implementation as Phoenix will likely have significantly less power overhead as compared to desktop Zen4 with its N6 IOD on top of being on a more mature N5 node.
I wouldn't be so sure about Meteor Lake being worse than Phoenix.
Here is a table about MT performance at different power limits. Link:
ComputerBase
As you can see, If you limit the power to 45W then 13900K is the most efficient of the bunch and 6+8 13600K is just a bit worse than 7700x.
This looks pretty bad for Zen4 considering It uses better process for both IOD(N6) and CCD(N5).
Of course the chiplet design is worsening the efficiency of Zen4, so a monolithic 8C Phoenix would perform better at 45W in this table, the question is by how much.
Increasing the power for 7700x by 20W(+44%) increased performance by just ~20%, but the chiplet overhead is hardly 20W, so Phoenix at 45W would be <98% in the table unless the supposed N4 process and additional changes makes up the difference.
Let's say Phoenix will be 20% faster at 45W.
Now back to Meteor Lake.
6+8 Meteor Lake would have the same configuration as 13600K and If you check the above table the 13700K with +2 P cores performs only 1% better at 45W, so only having 6+8 is not a surprise or a disappointment.
Meteor Lake should use Intel 4 and that supposedly reduces power consumption by 40% at ISO frequency or being 20% faster at ISO power.
I made a table based on the above table where I apply Intel 4 gains to Raptor Lake.
| 7600x | 7700x | 7900x | 7950x | Phoenix | 13600K | 13700K | 13900K |
| Performance at 45W | 69% | 82% | 83% | 84% | 98% | 79% | 80% | 92% |
| Intel 4 at ISO power | 69% | 82% | 83% | 84% | 98% | 95% | 96% | 110% |
| Intel 4 at ISO frequency | 69% | 82% | 83% | 84% | 98% | 79% at 27W | 80% at 27W | 92% at 27W |
Meteor Lake should use
Redwood Cove for P-cores and
Crestmont for E-cores. That would mean higher IPC than Raptor Lake, which will additionally increase performance at 45W than what I calculated in the above table.
Not sure how the performance at lower TDPs will look like, but Meteor Lake-U has 4P+8C cores. Pretty sure Phoenix IGP will be faster considering Meteor IGP will be limited to 128EU from what I read on net.
P.S. I just noticed, that Meteor supposedly has additional 2 LPE cores inside the SOC.
Videocardz