Intel 14th Gen Meteor Lake: Release Date, Specs, Socket, Leaks and Rumors

Mar 28, 2023

We have been hearing about Intel's 14th Gen Meteor Lake CPUs for a while now, and there have been certain twists in the development as more leaks have came out. We did review their 13th-Gen flagship CPU, the Intel Core i9-13900K, and I’m quite excited about Intel's next-gen offerings. On the Team Red side, AMD's Ryzen 7000 3D CPU lineup announced at CES 2023 have definitely been tempting users. But if you are still waiting to get a new processor, here's everything we know so far about the Intel Meteor Lake CPU lineup, including rumors on the Intel 14th Gen socket, release date, and what we know about the upcoming Meteor Lake architecture.

Except for select details on the AI features coming to 14th-Gen Meteor Lake CPUs, there has been no official announcement from Intel at the moment. But there have been a lot of leaks going around Twitter and Weibo, with new leaks sometimes sounding conflicting with the earlier ones. Still, we will try to cut through the noise and explain the details on Intel's upcoming Meteor Lake CPUs here:

So far, leaks suggest that Intel will definitely release new CPUs this year, potentially in Q3 2023 (July to September). However, if you were looking for a major upgrade from the 13th-Gen desktop CPUs, there's a good chance it may not happen anytime soon, especially if you want to avoid a ‘refresh year’ of CPUs, which might not have a sizable enough performance jump.

If we go according to Intel's leaked roadmap (courtesy of @9550pro's tweet), you can see that there is a new "Raptor Lake-S Refresh" CPU coming out in Q3 2023, which is not too far away.

But, why are we talking about Raptor Lake when Intel's 14th Gen CPUs should probably be using a new architecture? The reason is due to a post by a Weibo user, who claims that the Raptor Lake Refresh will be called the 14th-Generation by Intel. It's unclear whether the desktop or laptop 14th Gen CPU lineup is being referenced here.

As we said before, it's clear from the leaked roadmap (which is a confidential Intel document) that some CPUs will definitely come out this year. However, recent leaks are stirring up a ton of confusion as to what exactly will the 14th Gen CPU lineup entail. However, from my past experience and understanding, we might see different architectures existing under the same Intel 14th Gen branding. Basically, some of the laptop or desktop 14th Gen CPUs might actually be based on a refreshed version of the Raptor Lake S architecture.

An older update from YouTuber Moore's Law Is Dead on the Intel Meteor Lake situation did say that we should see new laptop CPUs under Intel's 14th Gen lineup releasing between Q2 and Q3 2023. So, we might see some laptop chips featuring the new Meteor Lake architecture release before September 2023 as well.

But judging by the various leaks this year, there seems to be a good chance that we will see some of Intel's 14th Gen CPUs get released by Q3 or Q4 2023, but it could either be a laptop or desktop CPU. Maybe even both, if the rumored Raptor Lake S desktop CPUs release under the 14th Gen CPU lineup. Also, if we don't see Intel Meteor Lake come out this year, judging by history, it should definitely come out in 2024.

What I can say (with some amount of certainty) is that Intel will have an answer for AMD's Ryzen 7000 series 3D V-Cache CPUs, and they will releasing it by Q4 2023 at most. These Intel CPUs should offer competitive performance by winning in some benchmarks and losing in some, but in the end, giving its users a new lineup of Intel processors to upgrade to, with competitive performance levels.

We will definitely update this article once Intel shares some official information. But for now, let's look at what other information we have available online, focusing on what we know in reference to the new architecture codenamed Intel Meteor Lake. However, we had shared some info related to the ‘refresh’ Raptor Lake S CPUs as well, since they could potentially be branded under Intel 14th Gen too.

We have definitely seen some leaks related to the socket details for Intel's 14th Gen desktop CPUs. But let's first answer a simple question that many people are going to have – Will Intel 14th Gen processors use the LGA1700 socket? This socket was previously used for Intel 12th Gen Alder Lake & 13th Gen Raptor Lake desktop CPUs, and many have been wondering if it will be supported in next gen CPUs as well.

The answer is probably no, you won't be able to use the Intel 14th-Gen Meteor Lake CPU with a 13th-Gen Z790 motherboard. It is because a decent number of reports have pointed to a new socket being released for desktop CPUs, and it is going to be called LGA 1851. Along with it, Intel is supposed to release the Z890 motherboard chipset, which has been rumored to have native PCI-e 5.0 implementation for M.2 NVMe SSDs. This could mean that a bigger percentage of Intel's Z890 motherboards will come with support for Gen 5 NVMe SSDs in contrast to older generations (via VideoCardz).

An image comparing the older Intel 12th and 13th Gen socket to the new LGA 1851 socket for 14th-Gen CPUs has also surfaced online, as shown below. The new leaked socket is similar to the older LGA 1700 socket size, so cooler compatibility across both these sockets should hold true.

It's also not confirmed if the rumored Raptor Lake ‘refresh’ will be under the 13th Gen or 14th Gen branding, and if it will be on the LGA 1700 or LGA 1851 socket. There has been some speculation by a well-established leaker (Twitter/@OneRaichu) that this new socket will support three processor generations from Intel.

🤔LGA18xx maybe will support three gen products too.(It just my guess)

Also, if the rumored Raptor Lake S Refresh comes out on LGA 1700 and is supported on previous-gen Z790 motherboards (and others), it would mean Intel has used the LGA 1700 socket for three different processor generations. It would be a major win for existing LGA 1700 motherboard owners if that does happen.

There has been a leaked benchmark of some Meteor Lake CPUs meant for laptops, although there are no interesting numbers to talk about here. Given that the processor was unrecognized by the website, there is some legibility to it being an early sample of an Intel Meteor Lake CPU. The CPU underperformed, and this was probably due to the hardware being in an early-testing phase.

However, from this leaked benchmark, we still get an idea of what kind of specifications Intel 14th-Gen Meteor Lake CPUs will have. The CPU in this benchmark had 12-cores and 16-threads. Given how Intel's CPUs are configured under the hood, there are probably 4 P-Cores on this CPU, hyperthreaded to 8 threads. That leaves 8 E-Cores and their respective threads, and in the end, this totals to 16 threads. We will definitely see the Hybrid E-Core + P-Core design here.

The benchmark also clearly says Intel Arc graphics, and Intel's 14th Gen CPUs have been rumored to have drastically different integrated graphics performance compared to the last generations. We will discuss the integrated graphics performance improvements in the next section, but first, let's look at what we know about the specifications. Obviously, there's nothing official yet.

However, igorslab.de has shared some specifications for the mobile variants of Intel 14th Gen processor. They also tell us about some new features, which we will discuss moving forward. The doc below also mentions the support of up to LPDDR5 7400MHz memory. Read more about DDR5 vs DDR4 here, if you’d like to know more. Have a look at this leaked overview of Intel's Meteor Lake U-Series, P-Series, and H-Series CPUs that will supposedly launch as mobile Meteor Lake CPUs for laptops:

There was another leaked benchmark (shared by Twitter/@BenchLeaks), which was for a laptop Meteor Lake CPU named Core Ultra 7 1003H. It was a PugetBench Lightroom test, which has now been deleted from the website. However, once something is uploaded on the internet, it is hard to make it go away. Below is the leaked benchmark, in which you can clearly see the processor name as well as Intel Arc graphics being shown under the GPU specifications.

If you noticed the key additions section in the igorslab.de leak in the last section, you will notice that the graphics architecture and media and display sections mention some interesting stuff. Intel seems to be revamping their integrated graphics architecture quite a lot for the upcoming 14th Gen CPUs and is also apparently adding AV1 support if the above leak is legitimate. AV1 codec is important, and you can read all about it here.

In an Intel investor meeting back in 2022, the former head of Intel's Accelerated Computing and Graphics division, Raja Koduri, talked about Intel Meteor Lake and what kind of improvements will it feature in the integrated graphics department. He said, "Meteor Lake is a brand new architecture that will enable tiled GPUs to be integrated on a 3D package. This is super exciting as this allows us to offer discrete graphics-class performance with the efficiency of integrated graphics." Furthermore, "this is a new class of graphics—you can't really call it integrated or discrete," he added. Here's a roadmap that was shared by Intel:

As you can see, in the roadmap they have mentioned the "Intel Arc Tile GPU" being implemented in the Meteor Lake CPU architecture, and the next generations of CPUs too. This upcoming generation of Intel Arc graphics that will be part of Intel 14th Gen CPUs will be called ‘Intel Arc Battlemage‘. These are technologies that will be part of the new processors, and we’ll definitely update this section when we can talk more about these features and what they mean.

I do think it's safe to say many of these new technologies which are being talked about with respect to the mobile CPU lineup of Intel 14th Gen will also make their way onto the desktop CPU lineup. Let's talk performance. According to the YouTuber Moore's Law Is Dead, who has shared some information recently on what's under the hood when speaking of the Intel Arc integrated graphics on Meteor Lake CPUs, his source claims that "we fully expect Meteor Lake to at least double 96EU Raptor Lake performance at same power." By 96EU, they are referring to the number of execution units on Raptor Lake CPUs.

In addition to this, it's rumored that 14th Gen CPUs could have up to 512MB of Cache, implemented to be utilized by the integrated graphics on a Meteor Lake CPU. This is touted as Adamantine Cache. Perhaps, desktop CPUs might not receive a major boost in graphics performance, but laptop CPUs definitely could! And they will do that under the same power limits if these leaks shape up.

Recently, there has been another update published by the YouTube Channel Moore's Law Is Dead talking about the Meteor Lake's integrated Intel Arc graphics. He says that "low-end graphics cards" will become undesirable after Meteor Lake, because of the high performance output they will have. As per the latest leaks, the high-end Meteor Lake Xe GPU can potentially beat the mobile GTX 1650, and possibly even the RTX 3050. This is quite exciting and would mean that entry-level gaming will be possible on Meteor Lake CPUs without a dedicated GPU, but better graphics performance will also highly benefit other applications. Battery life is also supposed to improve drastically with these new incredibly efficient GPUs.

Finally, let's talk about the performance of Intel's upcoming 14th Gen CPU lineup. Sadly, we don't have any performance benchmarks, but we will definitely update this section once we do. But, we can talk about the efficiency improvements. The new architecture is estimated to be up to 50% better in terms of overall efficiency, thanks to the Intel 4 manufacturing process.

This is a 7nm manufacturing process under the hood. To be honest, it's better to compare actual efficiency numbers than trying to base it off an assumption with what the manufacturing process is – Intel was able to dramatically increase efficiency with 13th Gen Raptor Lake CPUs while being on the same manufacturing node as previously released 12th Gen Alder Lake CPUs.

This has been estimated by a popular leaker (Twitter/ @OneRaichu) who also doubled down on the previous leak concerning the iGPU performance, saying that it could have 2x the performance levels when compared to Raptor Lake. The tweet before that states that the target of Meteor Lake CPUs is to have a 1.5x efficiency improvement, considering if it has to run at the same levels of performance. This is a pretty good jump. By the way, Intel's Core i9-13900K can pull off performance levels equal to the previous-gen i9-12900K's performance at just 65 watts, and that was without moving to a drastically different manufacturing process (it was still 10nm).

So, because this is in fact going to be an entirely new manufacturing process, we could see Intel making even bigger waves by dramatically increasing the efficiency, and thus, the performance potential, of the upcoming Meteor Lake CPUs.

About iGPU, I think it maybe will reach almost 2x perf levels. ([email protected]+GHz VS 96EU)— Raichu (@OneRaichu) February 6, 2023

Intel will be bringing new AI features as part of their 14th Gen Meteor Lake CPUs. The company recently unveiled some info about Meteor Lake, and how the CPU & GPU both will feature improvements to cater to the growing needs of artificial intelligence workloads. In addition to this, there is going to be a VPU on Meteor Lake chips, and this was talked about back in late 2022 as well. Microsoft's Partner Research Manager said that the VPU "represents an infliction point in computing," which is quite true.

One of the more interesting bit of news coming from the #IntelTechTour event is that Movidius-powered VPU technology will be integrated into @Intel's Raptor Lake mobile and future Core technology. This is important stuff and finally shows that #AI on PCs is getting real. pic.twitter.com/yBy82gGhVO— Bob O'Donnell (@bobodtech) September 13, 2022

Basically, this new VPU will highly benefit AI-specific tasks. For example, the GPU's rendering performance could be much better (or even be improved) if certain AI workloads can be offloaded to the VPU instead. Moving forward, Intel will focus on AI performance innovation a lot, so as to cater to the ever-growing needs of the new age of computing where AI holds such a massive importance.

In one of the leaked benchmarks, if you noticed the processor was called "Intel Core Ultra 7," which feels quite weird, right? Intel has been naming their CPUs as Core i3, Core i5, Core i7, and then came out with Core i9 at some point. Everybody knows this, and even people who don't follow the tech industry closely know the distinction between processor brandings and understand which processor would be faster. But now, Intel is potentially updating the naming scheme with their Meteor Lake CPUs.

Yes, we are making brand changes as we’re at an inflection point in our client roadmap in preparation for the upcoming launch of our #MeteorLake processors. We will provide more details regarding these exciting changes in the coming weeks! #Intel— Bernard Fernandes (@Bernard_P) May 1, 2023

TomsHardware asked Intel to comment on this leak, and they confirmed that they are surely making changes to the branding. They did not confirm the new names yet, but the leaked benchmark in the earlier section where the CPU was named Core Ultra 7 should tell you enough about what's probably going to happen. The iconic ‘i’ of Intel processors could be going away permanently.

We currently don't know whether Intel's 14th Gen CPUs will only support DDR5 memory, or if they will support for both DDR4 and DDR5 memory.

So far, leaks have been pointing out to a brand-new LGA 1851 socket for Intel's 14th Gen CPUs.

No, Intel's 14th Gen CPUs are not out yet. They have been delayed, and most probably we will see laptop CPUs come out this year that are part of the 14th Gen CPU lineup. However, desktop CPUs could also release.

Intel's 14th Gen lineup could have multiple architectures, although the new architecture is codenamed Meteor Lake.

We don't know the flagship Meteor Lake CPU variant yet, but a leak has pointed at up to 14 cores for the P-Series & H-Series laptop CPUs.

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