Meteor Lake should have been Intel's 13th Generation processor design
Published: 12th September 2022 | Source: Intel - Via Andreas Schilling | Author: Mark Campbell
Raptor Lake is Intel's stop-gap product before Meteor Lake - Intel confirms
At the company's Tech Tour press event, Intel confirmed that Raptor Lake was not originally part of the company's product roadmap, with its inception coming less than two years ago when Intel knew that there would be a long gap between Alder Lake and Meteor Lake.
Intel's Meteor Lake processors will utilise more complex manufacturing techniques, being a multi-chiplet design that uses multiple lithography nodes and the company's Foveros Die Interconnect (FDI) technology. Originally, Intel planned to release Meteor Lake as a successor to Alder Lake, but when timelines for Meteor Lake stretched out, Intel decided to create Raptor Lake, a design that required minimal resources to create, but could deliver compelling performance gains over Alder Lake. Meteor Lake should have been Intel's 13th Generation series of Core processors, now 13th Gen is Raptor Lake.
With Raptor Lake, Intel has avoided leaving a gap in their product roadmap that their competitors could exploit. Using multiple design enhancements, Raptor Lake can deliver higher clock speeds and increased IPC while retaining core designs that are very similar to their Alder Lake counterparts. With Raptor Lake, Intel is delivering more than a standard CPU refresh, but less than we would expect from a full core redesign.
Alder Lake, but with a lot more polish
In a sense, Raptor Lake is a highly polished version of Alder Lake, offering users more L2/L3 cache, additional E-cores to boost multi-threading performance, and higher core clock speeds to boost single-threaded and multi-threaded performance. Fundamentally, Raptor Lake is simply a refined version of Alder Lake, but that has not stopped Intel from delivering significant performance gains.
Based on SPECint207 performance, Intel has stated that their Raptor Lake processors can deliver a 15% increase in single-threaded performance over their predecessors and a 41% increase in multi-threaded performance. Beyond that, Intel's Raptor Lake lineup will include Intel's first 6GHz processor, which is a massive milestone for the company.
The boffins at Intel created Raptor Lake as a cheap and cheeky CPU design that would tide Intel over until their Meteor Lake series processors are ready for launch. Meteor Lake will include more architectural innovations and utilised improved lithography and packaging technologies. By creating Raptor Lake, Intel has created a strong stop-gap solution that plugs a hole in the company's roadmap that could have been exploited by AMD's Ryzen 7000 series processors.
Thanks to Raptor Lake, late 2022 is going to be a very competitive time for the CPU market.
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