Intel’s Meteor Lake processors, which are expected to arrive late in 2022 (or perhaps 2023) have already popped up in Linux code.
These will be the 13th-gen chips from Intel and as Phoronix reports, they’ve been spotted in Linux 5.10 patches.
Specifically, Meteor Lake support has been introduced with the Intel e1000e Linux driver, which is a Gigabit Ethernet driver. This could mean that Intel will stay with 1Gb Ethernet as Meteor Lake blazes onto the scene, rather than moving to 2.5Gb networking, but at this early stage, we’d be foolish to rush to any judgements.
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Meteor Lake is still several years away and three generations out as we’ve mentioned: before it we’ll have Rocket Lake (the next-gen CPUs to succeed Comet Lake) and Alder Lake, the latter of which is set to make some big changes to Intel’s entire architecture (adopting an ARM-style big.LITTLE combination of low-power and high-power cores).
Current roadmap
Intel’s plan is to get Alder Lake out in the second half of 2021, hence the expectation that Meteor Lake will arrive a year later towards the end of 2022 – although while that’s the roadmap sketched out now, there’s no guarantee we won’t see slippage.
However, perhaps we can keep our fingers crossed that seeing some of the early groundwork for Meteor Lake appearing now could be a hint that things are progressing on-track thus far.
Meteor Lake is thought to be built on a 7nm process and will move to a new architecture featuring Ocean Cove plus Gracemont cores, using Intel’s Hybrid Technology as per Alder Lake (which will be 10nm and use Golden Cove plus Gracemont, the latter being the low-power cores for efficient running that could revolutionize things for laptops).
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