Intel Meteor Lake laptops make a brief appearance online – with some steep pricing
We may now have some clues about Intel Meteor Lake laptop prices, with listings emerging online that give us a clearer idea of what you and your wallet can expect.
Two laptops have been listed on a Bulgarian retailer’s site, with both models apparently based on Lenovo’s Yoga Pro 7 with 32GB of DDR5 memory and 1TB of SSD storage. According to the tweet below from @momomo_us, the laptops also offer 14.5-inch touchscreens with 3K resolution with a 120Hz refresh rate.
In 2022, Intel unveiled a roadmap for investors, sharing exciting news about their upcoming CPU architectures, Meteor and Arrow Lake. These chips will be based on the advanced ‘Intel 4’ CPU architecture, using a 7nm lithography process. It’s a welcome departure from the previous Intel 7 with its 10nm process, although the naming can be a little baffling.
What this means to us is the potential for a significant performance boost in the 14th generation Meteor Lake chips compared to the jump we saw between Intel’s 12th and 13th CPU generations. Keep in mind, however, that this shift may not be as groundbreaking as the shift we saw when Intel moved from the 14nm microarchitecture found in its 11th generation chips. That transition also introduced the split-core “performance/efficiency” design, seen in 12th generation Core processors and beyond.
According to Wccftech the Lenovo Yoga Pro 7 is currently listed at 2,948 Bulgarian Lev or $1,594, while the Core Ultra 5 125H model is priced at 2,579 Bulgarian Lev or $1,395. Please note that these prices are likely preliminary and we may anticipate adjustments as we approach the product’s launch date.
Those prices seem a bit high: over a thousand dollars for the equivalent of a Core i5 laptop (although Intel is dropping its iconic ‘i’ nomenclature for these new chips) is quite a lot. With prices like that, Intel will have to deliver big time if it wants to stay relevant in the face of Apple’s upcoming M3 chip.
What is clear – or at least what we can reasonably infer from credible sources – is that Intel is shifting towards a ’tile-based’ design for Meteor Lake. These “tiles” are essentially chiplets that split different CPU processes into separate units on the CPU chip. For example, they separate I/O functions, including support for PCIe 5.0 and Thunderbolt 4, into their own chiplet to improve overall performance. This innovation promises exciting advancements in CPU technology.