Intel confirms arrival of L4 cache Adamantium, but only in Arrow Lake

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger confirms that future generations of CPUs will have a new cache memory. However, that L4 cache is not included in the new Meteor Lake generation, but will only be included in the upcoming Arrow Lake generation at the earliest.

Gelsinger said that according to ComputerBase in an interview on Wednesday evening. That extra cache is called Adamantium and is not an extension of existing cache memory, but an extra layer on top of it. Or rather, at the bottom, because the memory layer is located at the bottom of the CPU, according to Gelsinger.

In April, a patent surfaced for a possible L4 cache. That patent then contained references to possible Meteor Lake integrations; for example, there were images in the patent showing the same number of cores and tiles that it was already known that Meteor Lake would have. Now, however, Gelsinger says the cache won’t appear in that generation. The development time for this would have been too short to properly integrate the new cache. Moreover, the chips ‘wouldn’t have needed that’. The next generation of CPUs that can contain Adamantium is Arrow Lake.

Intel has often included an L4 cache in a desktop processor in the past. This happened in the Broadwell generation of chips, which had an integrated GPU with 128MB of embedded DRAM. That acted as such an L4 cache.

Intel’s L4 cache patent (left) and the previously confirmed Meteor Lake build, with a CPU chiplet, GPU chiplet and SoC chiplet