Die shots of Meteor Lake’s SoC and GPU tiles have come out with a detailed view of each individual core and component inside the two chips (via @9550pro on X). Intel previously showed die shots of the CPU tile, but this is the first time we’ve seen what the SoC and GPU tiles look like under the hood.
Although they were designed by Intel, the SoC and GPU tiles are manufactured at TSMC on the company’s 6nm and 5nm nodes, respectively. This is not the first time Intel has fabbed at TSMC — the brand’s Arc Alchemist and Ponte Vecchio Compute tiles were also made on TSMC’s 6nm and 5nm nodes, respectively. However, it is the first time that the core parts of an Intel CPU have been made at TSMC.
Meteor Lake Die ShotSOC Tile and GPU Tile Source: QQ (10,000 bullshit) pic.twitter.com/OmmTfDqpKDDecember 20, 2023
The die shots, seen above (click to expand), are unfortunately not annotated, so it’s a little difficult to make sense of them. Although Intel detailed the internals of each Meteor Lake tile in the past, the annotations were more for illustrative purposes and aren’t actually all that accurate.
The SoC tile in particular is very complex, which is expected as it hosts a variety of features such as the Neural Processing Unit (NPU), two low-power E-cores, and video functions such as HDMI, DisplayPort, and AV1 encoding/decoding. Using Intel’s illustrative die shots, we can see that Xe Media Engine is the large rectangle in the upper middle, but other components aren’t so clear-cut.
The GPU tile is easier to decipher thanks to its more uniform design. It’s easy to pick out the eight Xe cores that line the perimeter on the left, right, and bottom of the chip. It’s clear that Intel was trying to pack these cores as tightly as possible, as Meteor Lake’s Xe cores aren’t symmetrical like the ones in Intel’s Arc Alchemist GPUs.
