As part of today’s Q1’2023 earnings announcement from Intel, the company is offering a brief update on the state of its upcoming chips and manufacturing nodes. Key among these disclosures is a status update on Meteor Lake, Intel’s next-generation client processor (and first disaggregated chiplet CPU), as well as the Intel 4 process node that it will be built upon.
According to Intel, the company is on track to launch Meteor Lake in the second half of the year. And more specifically, at this point Meteor Lake is now in production and ramping alongside the new Intel 4 process.
The basis of what we expect will be sold as Intel’s 14th generation of Core processors, Meteor Lake is a critical part for Intel that represents several firsts for the company. It’ll be the first client CPU using chiplets, but also the first heterogenous chiplet CPU from the company, using different chiplets for I/O, CPU cores, graphics, and more. And on the manufacturing side of matters, it’s going to be the lead product for Intel’s next-generation EUV-based Intel 4 process node, as well as Intel’s biggest use of Foveros 3D die stacking technology yet – and the first attempt to do so for a relatively cheap, mass-market processor.
Intel’s last significant update on Meteor Lake came almost exactly a year ago, when the company announced during their Q1’2022 earnings report that it had been successfully powered on for testing. So at a year later, Intel is now making final preparations for a product launch later this year. The official launch window is still in the second half of the year – Intel client processor ramp-ups take several months even without all-new manufacturing technologies in play – so we expect Intel will announce more concrete details on that launch some time in the third quarter.