Intel Meteor Lake lastly will get a desktop CPU launch, however with a catch

Intel has simply introduced the primary CPUs that may use the corporate’s next-gen LGA1851 socket, however reasonably than this heralding an early arrival of Intel’s subsequent gen Arrow Lake chips, these new chips are in reality desktop Intel Meteor Lake CPUs, which are based mostly on the corporate’s Meteor Lake-PS structure.

Meteor Lake was imagined to be an enormous deal for Intel, with the brand new structure ushering in a brand new chip design type, utilizing a number of smaller chiplets or ’tiles’ to create every CPU. It additionally used a brand new smaller 7nm manufacturing course of, in comparison with the 14nm course of used on the earlier three generations of Intel‘s finest gaming CPUs. Nonetheless, the launch didn’t fairly go to plan, and Intel finally solely launched the designs in a cell kind, till now.

So sure, Intel is lastly launching a correct desktop variant of Meteor Lake, and furthermore, this event marks the primary desktop CPUs to launch that assist Intel’s new LGA1851 CPU socket. We didn’t anticipate to see this platform launch till the arrival of Arrow Lake CPUs later within the yr. There’s one massive catch on the subject of this desktop Meteor Lake CPU launch, although, which is that you simply received’t have the ability to purchase these CPUs by means of regular shops.

On the plus aspect, you wouldn’t wish to purchase them for gaming anyway,  as they’re primarily geared toward use in ‘edge’ AI computing setups. These are the kinds of techniques you’ll see powering AI-enhanced point-of-sales machines, and all method of different embedded, or small server-type, techniques that want the additional horsepower of Intel’s AI-focused neural processing items (NPUs).

This lack of a give attention to making gaming-centric, really highly effective general-purpose desktop CPUs is mirrored within the omission of any Intel Core Extremely 9 variants, though there are a number of fairly highly effective Extremely 7 variations with as many as six P-Cores and eight E-Cores. Clock speeds additionally hit as excessive as 5GHz, which is a far cry from the 6.2GHz of the Intel Core i9 14900KS, however will nonetheless make for a speedy chip.

Notably, none of those new chips has a TDP greater than 65W, with a number of dropping as little as 12W, highlighting the low-power, constantly-on utilization situations focused by these chips.

As for motherboards with the LGA1851 socket, the platform for these chips will enable motherboards to assist 5600MHz DDR5 reminiscence, two PCIe Gen4 SSDs, and 4 Thunderbolt 4 units. Nonetheless, there’s no chipset assist for Thunderbolt 5, Wi-Fi 7, or PCIe Gen5.

The brand new desktop Intel Meteor Lake chips aren’t anticipated to really be obtainable till This fall 2024, which suggests a while from September onwards. That additionally coincides with the anticipated launch of Arrow Lake desktop CPUs for avid gamers, in line with the most recent rumors.