Intel is gearing up for the launch of its highly anticipated Meteor Lake chips, which will bring significant advancements in integrated graphics.

Utilizing the advanced Intel 4 process technology, the upcoming mobile Core Ultra series will deploy a hybrid design, incorporating both Redwood Cove (Core) and Crestmont (Atom) architectures. The Meteor Lake qualification sample is presently operating within a 20 to 65W power range, boasting a potential boost clock of up to 4.8 GHz.

The total compute die of Meteor Lake consists of 6 Performance cores, 8 Efficient cores, and 2 Low-Power Efficient cores. The GPU subsystem is slated to house 8 Xe Cores with 128 Execution Units or 1024 shading units (FP32 cores). A suggested boost clock of 2.2 GHz would result in a single-precision compute power of 4.5 TFLOPS, indicating a moderate 5% rise compared to the Radeon 780M RDNA3 iGPU used in Phoenix APUs.

While AMD Phoenix APUs have seen favorable adoption in small handheld gaming systems, their performance in laptops has not met expectations. Despite this, AMD has successfully tapped into new markets, and Intel could likely follow suit. A broader range of options without the need for dedicated graphics could become feasible if Intel manages to improve its drivers.

Per a brief social media post on Bilibili, Meteor Lake's laptop-focused prototypes feature six high-performance Redwood Cove cores running at 4.80 GHz, eight power-efficient Crestmont cores, and two low-power Crestmont cores. The unit's TDP can be adjusted from 20 W to 65 W. Reports also suggest a Core Ultra 9 model potentially reaching maximum CPU clocks of 5.0 GHz or even higher. The qualification sample's integrated graphics processing unit is predicated on the Xe-LPG architecture, which some analysts speculate could deliver performance comparable to Arc A380 or A370M discrete solutions, with an indicated 4.5 FP32 TFLOPS. The iGPU might feature up to 128 execution units, equivalent to 1024 stream processors and 8 Xe clusters. Insiders suggest that these units could attain a maximum boost clock of 2.2 GHz. Comparisons to AMD's Radeon 780M iGPU, with a theoretically similar performance of 4.3 FP32 TFLOPS, will illuminate.

Intel Meteor Lake Xe-LPG Graphics: Architecture, Clock Speeds