Intel Boosts Meteor Lake CPU & Arc Graphics Tile With “Adamantine” L4 Cache

wccftech.com:

Intel Meteor Lake CPUs will be the first to feature the brand-new Adamantine L4 cache which will give a big boost to the Arc graphics tile.

A few weeks back, it was reported that Intel was working to implement a new ADM L4 cache on its upcoming 14th-Gen Meteor Lake CPUs. The new cache will come in capacities of several MBs and be targeted primarily at the Arc Xe-LPG GPU which is featured on the graphics tile, one of the many tiles on Meteor Lake GPUs.

In a patent published by Intel back in 2020, it is mentioned that the Adamantine L4 cache will sit on the base tile and will be accessible to the rest of the IPs and tiles on the interposer. This design will be fully utilized by the Meteor Lake-M and Meteor Lake-P chips which target the mobility platform.

Coelacanth-Dream also explains why the Intel Arc Xe-LPG GPUs will be the main beneficiary of the Adamantine L4 cache. In recent patches, discovered by Phoronix, it was revealed that, unlike the previous designs, Intel Meteor Lake GPU cannot utilize the LLC on the chip which was previously shared by both the CPU and GPU. As such, the Adamantine L4 cache will play a huge role to assist the performance of Meteor Lake chips in graphics workloads.

Since the Adamantine L4 cache can also be used by the Compute Title (CPU Cores), which are made up of Redwood Cove (P-Core) & Crestmont (E-Core) hybrid configurations, it can lead to faster boot times and overall lower latencies compared to moving data to the primary DRAM. The patent states that:

Next generation client SoC architectures may introduce large on-package caches, which will allow novel usages. Access time for the L4 (e.g., “Adamantine” or “ADM”) cache may be much less than the DRAM access time, which is used to improve host CPU