Intel’s next-gen Meteor Lake CPUs could be amazing for laptops

Meteor Lake CPUs, Intel’s next-gen chips to follow Raptor Lake, are going to provide some huge boosts on the efficiency front if a fresh rumor proves to be correct.

As Wccftech (opens in new tab) reports, this is another from that fountain of speculation which is Twitter, and one of the better-known hardware leakers on that platform, namely Raichu.

Raichu believes that Intel is targeting 50% power efficiency gains – at least – with its 14th-gen Meteor Lake processors, compared to current Raptor Lake silicon. In other words, when running at the same performance level as a 13th-gen chip, a next-gen model will use a third less power.

Raichu does mention performance briefly in that Twitter thread, but only to confirm that Meteor Lake will increase it – as would be fully expected. However, the leaker doesn’t give us any idea of the kind of uptick to expect on that front from these next-gen processors.

We’re also told that integrated graphics for Meteor Lake will nearly double performance levels compared to Raptor Lake, which would be seriously impressive, too.

Analysis: Yet more evidence of Intel’s fresh focus on efficiency

All this is great news for laptops, if it pans out of course – we must always be cautious of how much stock we put in rumors. That said, there has already been quite a bit of buzz about how Meteor Lake will focus on efficiency, driving forward with ever-increasing amounts of efficiency cores that could benefit from a new architecture. (Indeed, past rumors have suggested that the 14th-gen may not even have Core i9 models for the desktop, such might be the focus on mobile).

A 50% increase in efficiency, or maybe more, will mean that laptops will be able to pack more powerful chips that’ll be thermally okay within the confines of a small chassis. And if integrated graphics are nearly twice as performant as Raptor Lake – with Intel already making great strides on that front – we can expect thin-and-light notebooks that offer impressive performance not just for apps, but also for light gaming duties too.

The word from the grapevine is that Lunar Lake, in theory the 16th-generation for Intel, will also drive hard with efficiency to the point that it’s built with laptops in mind. All of this might leave desktop users worrying that Intel could neglect performance, with only Arrow Lake, which will be the 15th-gen, likely to pack a Core i9 heavyweight desktop CPU to take the baton from the current 13900K.

Mind you, that’s really treading deeper into the territory of speculation, so desktop PC enthusiasts shouldn’t lose too much sleep – not yet, anyway. But it is very much starting to sound more and more like Intel will focus big on efficiency over the next few generations, making a distinct change from recent iterations of the Core family which have really pushed hard to get beefy performance levels, putting the power usage pedal to the proverbial metal (at least on the desktop at the high-end, anyway).