Intel held its first public demonstration of Raptor Lake, its upcoming generation of processors, at its investor event. The company simultaneously confirmed the arrival of successors Meteor Lake, Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake.
Intel showed the 32 threads of a Raptor Lake processor in Windows 11’s task manager. The company first demonstrated how the Blender program fully loaded all cores. Then Intel minimized Blender and performed a compute-intensive operation in Adobe After Effects. Blender was still taking the threads of the efficient cores and loading them 100 percent in the background, while the powerful cores did the math for After Effects.
Raptor Lake is the successor to Alder Lake and the first processors should appear this year. The most powerful processor of the Raptor Lake generation will offer 24 cores and 32 threads; this concerns eight so-called Performance cores and sixteen Efficient cores. Jim Johnson of Intel’s Client Computing Group promised “double-digit” performance gains over today’s Alder Lake, without providing further details. The processors will be socket and BGA compatible with Alder Lake systems. Intel further mentioned the combination with an upcoming M.2 module that can provide hardware acceleration for computational work related to artificial intelligence.
Meteor Lake, Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake
At its Intel Investor event, the company gave a glimpse into the future. Meteor Lake and Arrow Lake, for example, should appear in 2023 and 2024, respectively. These are processor generations that Intel makes on its ‘Intel 4’ node, or 7nm process, and which consist of several chiplets. Intel connects these together via EMIB, which stands for embedded die interconnect bridge, and it uses its Foveros technique for stacking chips on a single package. Meteor Lake will receive an integrated GPU based on the Xe architecture and an accelerator for AI compute loads.
By 2024, Intel hopes to deploy its 20A node. Intel claims to be in the ngström era, but the node can be qualified as a ‘2nm’ process. From 2024, Lunar Lake will be at 18A. In its own words, Intel focuses mainly on the combination of economy and performance. Intel may then use Arrow Lake for more powerful systems and Lunar Lake for more efficient devices in 2024, but the company has not yet provided details about this.