To 'Meteor Lake' and Beyond: How Intel Plans a New Era of 'Chiplet'-Based CPUs
At Hot Chips 2022(Opens in a new window), Intel lifted the curtain to show off some tantalizing details around its upcoming 14th Generation "Meteor Lake" processors. Now, these cutting-edge CPUs aren’t likely to ship anytime soon. (We still have yet to see the release of Intel’s 13th Generation "Raptor Lake" processors, though Intel insists Meteor Lake is on track to launch in the second half of 2023.) But the details we've seen so far are deeply fascinating and show a growing change in the way that modern processors are designed.
Starting with Meteor Lake (and followed on by "Arrow Lake," its presumptive 15th Generation Core family), Intel will transition to using a "chiplet" design for its consumer processors, with many tiny tiles that handle different functions fused together into a single chip. It's a significant departure from the "monolithic" design of existing Intel processors, and it could lead to faster—and, maybe, more affordable—processors in the years to come.
From the beginning, the computer industry has incessantly pushed for tighter integration. Way back in 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore coined what became known as “Moore’s Law,” the much-flogged axiom that anticipated a doubling of the number of components in an integrated circuit every year. This hasn’t always held entirely true, but it nonetheless shows the critical importance of integration to the chip industry.
Over the last several decades, we have seen numerous components integrated into CPUs: floating point modules, cache, memory controllers, PCI Express controllers, video controllers, display controllers, graphics processors, and a host of other circuits. In general, this has had many positive payoffs, from lowering production costs and power
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