Shocking news broke last week that Intel's upcoming Meteor Lake CPUs will shrink from the eight performance cores (open in new tab) found in the Alder Lake 12th generation (open in new tab) and the current Raptor Lake 13th generation (open in new tab),

It has been suggested that the number of performance cores will be reduced to just six (open in new tab).

Meteor Lake, due out next year, will be the first of a brave new dynasty of chiplet-based CPUs, with the CPU core, graphics core, and IO functions each given a separate die, or "tile" in Intel-speak. Meteor Lake will also be the first CPU to use Intel 4, the process node formerly known as 7nm. [Intel 4 will only be used for Meteor Lake's CPU core, the GPU die will be manufactured at TSMC in Taiwan, and the IO tiles will be manufactured on Intel's cheaper legacy process. This is a mix-and-match approach, where Intel reserves the most advanced manufacturing technology for the most important part, the CPU core itself.

In any case, the inference that some Intel watchers have drawn about Meteor Lake is that the dominant PC CPU maker plans to back off from eight to six high-performance cores in the highest specs of Meteor Lake chips. core i 9 Let me quote the actual headline that reportedly said the 14900K will have six performance cores. [But this is almost certainly incorrect. To be clear, the idea that Meteor Lake CPUs will be limited to six performance cores is very likely correct. This information has now been confirmed by multiple sources, and Intel itself has released die shots of Meteor Lake, revealing a six-core P-core architecture.

What will not happen, however, is a Core i9 14900K CPU with six performance cores. Instead, Intel will limit Meteor Lake to cheaper, more mainstream Core i5 and perhaps i7 models. How Intel will adjust its product stack to make this possible remains to be seen. Intel may launch some tweaked high-end Raptor Lake refresh chips to keep the high-end products looking reasonably fresh when Meteor Lake CPUs are introduced further down the range.

In 2024, of course, Intel has another new architecture on its roadmap, known as Arrow Lake, which is expected to feature a full complement of eight high clock performance cores.

To understand what is going on here, it is worth remembering that this is not the first time Intel has sold a mishmash of CPU architectures and process nodes simultaneously. Nor is this the first time that Intel has designed the first CPU of a new process node to be relatively conservative.

In fact, rumors suggest that Meteor Lake may be lower clocked than Raptor Lake. The combination of lower core counts and lower clocks would create a picture of a fairly tentative early Intel 4 CPU tile and a second-generation Arrow Lake CPU tile with more cores and higher clocks in the more mature Intel 4 process. Intel also expects Arrow Lake to use a different, more advanced process, known as Intel 20A, but only in models with fewer cores for laptops.

Indeed, there is a predisposition for another troubling product stack from Intel. But we've been here before, especially with Intel's puzzling 14nm generation of chips and at least three different CPU architectures being sold under the same brand generation.

So what we will almost certainly see is not Intel temporarily regressing P-cores from eight to six at the high end and then back again. At the high end, there will be at least eight performance cores retained. But just as Intel's Tiger Lake CPUs never appeared on desktops at all, Meteor Lake high-end desktop chips are unlikely to appear.

Long story short, take the panicky headlines about the six P-core Meteor Lake CPUs with a pinch of salt. There is a good chance that they are not strictly wrong. The reality, however, will be a bit more complicated.