Intel's Meteor Lake GPU will drop the need for a discrete graphics chip on entry-level laptops as it will deliver great performance with higher battery times.
Intel Meteor Lake GPU May Offer Up To RTX 3050 Performance At Just 45W, Thin & Light Laptops With Higher Battery Times
As a part of his latest video, Moore's Law is Dead also shared an alleged AMD Internal presentation for Q4 2022 which compared the graphics performance of its upcoming integrated graphics with a range of NVIDIA discrete solutions. The slides also show the projection of Intel's Meteor Lake iGPU and put it behind the Phoenix 45W solution though that has changed and the Meteor Lake Xe-LPG GPU is now projected to deliver much better performance.
The slide shows the AMD Radeon 780M GPU featured on Phoenix APUs with 12 RDNA 3 Compute Units at 45W sitting ahead of the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 (50W). The Strix Point APUs have also been shown here which offer faster than NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 (35W) performance with RDNA 3+ GPUs configured with 16 Compute Units at 45W.
Initially, the Intel Meteor Lake GPU which features the Xe-LPG Alchemist architecture, the same as the Arc GPUs, was said to end up behind the Phoenix RDNA 3 APU however it looks like the Meteor Lake chip is much more powerful and can deliver performance anywhere between the NVIDIA GTX 1650 Ti and the RTX 3050 at 45W. The Intel Meteor Lake Xe-LPG GPU will feature a new tiled design and incorporate up to 128 Execution Units. The GPU tile will be fabricated on the TSMC 5nm node and early leaks have shown it to be clocking up to 2.1 GHz and delivering over 4 TFLOPs of compute horsepower.
These GPUs will have two configurations, a 64 EU (MTL GT2) and 128 EU (MTL GT3) design. These will also enable enhanced support for DirectX 12 Ultimate & XeSS, features that are only supported by the Alchemist lineup as of right now. Intel will also be using its brand new Adamantine L4 cache starting with Meteor Lake GPUs which will definitely give a nice boost to the GPUs. Overall, having an integrated GPU of this level would mean that laptop manufacturers can enable cheaper designs with far better battery times compared to those with discrete GPUs.
Now we can't say how well these GPUs will perform in gaming benchmarks since the performance here is only measured within 3DMark Fire Strike and synthetics aren't the best way to showcase a true gaming scenario. AMD's RDNA 3 GPUs are offering some great numbers in several AAA titles and they have yet to receive proper driver support so expect more information from Intel about the true capabilities of its Xe-LPG GPUs soon.
Intel's Meteor Lake chips will be landing soon as they are planned to launch in Q4 2023. Intel has a Vision event happening this month so expect more information during that.
Intel Mobility CPU Lineup:
| CPU Family | Panther Lake | Lunar Lake | Arrow Lake | Meteor Lake | Raptor Lake | Alder Lake |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Process Node (CPU Tile) | Intel 18A | TSMC N3B | TSMC N3B | Intel 4 | Intel 7 | Intel 7 |
| Process Node (GPU Tile) | TSMC N3E / Intel 3 | TSMC N3B | TSMC 5nm | TSMC 5nm | Intel 7 | Intel 7 |
| CPU Architecture | Hybrid | Hybrid (Dual-Core) | Hybrid (Triple-Core) | Hybrid (Triple-Core) | Hybrid (Dual-Core) | Hybrid (Dual-Core) |
| P-Core Architecture | Cougar Cove | Lion Cove | Lion Cove | Redwood Cove | Raptor Cove | Golden Cove |
| E-Core Architecture | Darkmont | N/A | Skymont | Crestmont | Gracemont | Gracemont |
| LP E-Core Architecture (SOC) | Darkmont | Skymont | Crestmont | Crestmont | N/A | N/A |
| Top Configuration (Compute Tile) | 4+8 (H-Series) | 4+4 (MX Series) | 6+8 (H-Series) 2+8 (U-Series) | 6+8 (H-Series) 2+8 (U-Series) | 6+8 (H-Series) 8+16 (HX-Series) | 6+8 (H-Series) 8+8 (HX-Series) |
| Max Cores / Threads | 16/16 | 8/8 | 14/14 | 14/20 | 14/20 | 14/20 |
| AI NPU | NPU5 (50 TOPS) | NPU4 (48 TOPS) | NPU3.5 (13 TOPS) | NPU3 (11 TOPS) | NPU2 (7 TOPS) | NPU2 (7 TOPS) |
| Planned Lineup | Core Ultra 300 | Core Ultra 200V | Core Ultra 200 | Core Ultra 100 | 14th/13th Gen | 12th Gen |
| GPU Architecture | Xe3-LPG (Battlemage) | Xe2-LPG (Battlemage) | Xe-LPG+ (Alchemist) | Xe-LPG (Alchemist) | Iris Xe (Gen 12) | Iris Xe (Gen 12) |
| Xe Cores (Max) | 12 Xe3 Cores | 8 Xe2 Cores | 8 Xe Cores | 8 Xe Cores | 96 EUs (768 Cores) | 96 EUs (768 Cores) |
| Memory Support | LPDDR5X-9600 | LPDDR5X-8533 | DDR5-5600 LPDDR5-7500 LPDDR5X-8533 | DDR5-5600 LPDDR5-7400 LPDDR5X - 7400+ | DDR5-5200 LPDDR5-5200 LPDDR5-6400 | DDR5-4800 LPDDR5-5200 LPDDR5X-4267 |
| Memory Capacity (Max) | 128 GB | 32 GB | 128 GB | 96 GB | 64 GB | 64 GB |
| Thunderbolt Support | TB5 | TB5 | TB5 | TB4 | TB4 | TB4 |
| WiFi Capability | WiFi 7 | WiFi 7 | WiFi 7 | WiFi 6E | WiFi 6E | WiFi 6E |
| TDP | 17-45W | 17-30W | TBD | 7W-45W | 15-55W | 15-55W |
| Launch | 2H 2025 | 2H 2024 | 2H 2024 | 2H 2023 | 1H 2023 | 1H 2022 |
About the author: A Software Engineer by training and a PC enthusiast by passion, Hassan Mujtaba serves as Wccftech's Senior Editor for hardware section. With years of experience in the industry, he specializes in deep-dive technical analysis of next-generation CPU and GPU architectures, motherboards, and cooling solutions. His work involves not only breaking news on upcoming technologies but also extensive hands-on reviews and benchmarking.
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