Intel Meteor Lake 14th-gen CPUs already spotted in early photo

Intel 4 process – otherwise known as 7nm – will be a major performance uplift

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Intel’s Meteor Lake processors, which will be its 14th-gen chips – the ones following next-gen models (Raptor Lake) and expected in 2023 – have already been spotted and photographed; or at least test versions of the chips have.

This initial sighting of Meteor Lake – which will be the first ofIntel’s CPUs to blaze onto 7nm (finally) – was recorded byCNET’s Stephen Shankland, who snapped a close-up of a wafer of Meteor Lake test chips (see below), quite possibly of the M-Series (low-power models).

Shankland reminds us that manufacturing will begin in 2022, and shipping isscheduled for 2023 as Intel previously told us(remember thatMeteor Lake was ‘taped in’ back in May 2021, meaning all separate design elements of the CPUs were complete back then).

During his tour of Intel’s Fab 42 in Arizona, Shankland also got to see Sapphire Rapids next-gen Xeon Scalable processors for servers. Earlier this week, we also heard about high-end desktop (HEDT)Sapphire Rapids-X chips and how they are expected to launch in Q3 of 2022.

Analysis: Intel 4 looking good for 2023

Spotting test chips is another exciting hint that Intel is on target with its proposed 2023 launch for Meteor Lake.

These 14th-gen processors will be built on the Intel 4 process (7nm EUV), which is expected to be a considerable 20% performance uplift over Intel 7 (Enhanced SuperFin) as used in the current-genAlder Lakechips. A refresh of the latter is expected to bridge the move between Intel 7 and Intel 4, which will be Raptor Lake 13th-gen as mentioned at the outset.

Raptor Lake is expected to arrive in Q3 of 2022 (alongside Sapphire Rapids-X), andcould be a serious step up in power-efficiency itself.

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Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - ‘I Know What You Did Last Supper’ - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).

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