Last week, Intel held its annual Innovation event, showing off upcoming hardware and titillating the crowd with naked wafers. At the show, Intel finally unveiled the long-awaited Meteor Lake architecture and gave it a launch date—Dec. 14. Given that so far, all of the leaked information about its various Core Ultra CPUs have fewer cores than a Raptor Lake desktop chip, it was assumed this was to be a mobile-only platform. However, according to Intel, that is not the case, and desktop versions will arrive in 2024.
Intel didn't confirm this information on stage during the discussions of Meteor Lake. Instead, it decided the best place to make this blockbuster announcement was during an interview with PCWorld, away from the main floor. At the show, a reporter was talking to Michelle Johnston Holthaus, the Executive Vice President and General Manager of the Client Computing Group. She was asked if there would be a desktop version of Meteor Lake, and she responded by saying, "Desktop will come in 2024." The reporter seemed shocked to hear this, just like we are, and replied, "So you are confirming desktop Meteor Lake?" She replied, "Yes." The surprising announcement was flagged by Videocardz.
The two went on to confirm that, unlike leaks have suggested, there will be one family of CPUs for Intel in 2024 on both mobile and desktop: Meteor Lake. We had figured that since there will be a Raptor Lake refresh for high-end desktop parts, which Intel has confirmed, it would be the desktop lineup that would carry the company into 2024, with Meteor Lake taking over on the mobile side of things. How these two processor lines will share the limelight in 2024 remains unclear. Raptor Lake will reportedly offer more cores and threads, while Meteor Lake offers better efficiency and an NPU for AI-related tasks. It also refutes the long-held thought that Meteor Lake desktop was indeed cancelled.
What's also surprising about this announcement is Meteor Lake uses a new LGA 1851 socket, which will require new chipsets, and so far, we've heard zero details about what those will entail. It also remains unclear how high-end Core Ultra Meteor Lake CPUs will compare with the Raptor Lake chips they are theoretically replacing, as it'll be a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison because the former uses tiles, a smaller node, and is new from the ground up. It's also possible this desktop lineup will be midrange Core 3/5 SKUs, designed to take on AMD's APUs instead of its own fire-breathing K-series chips.
