The bottom tile for Intel’s upcoming Meteor Lake (opens in new tab) processors will include a big L4 cache, probably serving to squeeze extra efficiency out of the built-in graphics chip and boosting boot occasions.
I really like an excellent techie codename, and Intel’s Adamantine is considered one of my favorite current ones. It is solely just lately come to gentle by way of a patent (opens in new tab) that has been unearthed, which particulars this strong base tile for the corporate’s first true chiplet CPU, Meteor Lake.
Yeah, I will admit after I first noticed it I assumed it was a nerdy Wolverine reference, too, however it simply means ‘unable to be damaged’, which I assume is just about the identical. Kinda.
Anyhow, the patent was filed a few years again, however has just lately been delivered to the eye of ComputerBase (opens in new tab), who had been speaking about Meteor Lake having some additional pool of L4 cache for a short while.
It had initially thought the additional L4 was purely a type of Infinity Cache analog—much like that utilized by AMD for its fashionable graphics playing cards—or an eDRAM cache clone, to enhance the speeds of the built-in Xe graphics cores. This was the speculation anyway, significantly as a result of the Linux patch notes described how the iGPU would now not have entry to the compute tile’s L3 cache.
However the patent really goes additional, describing that the L4 cache—with entry time for the L4 cache being probably “a lot lower than the DRAM entry time” of system reminiscence—will even assist with boot optimisations. As primarily a laptop computer half, Meteor Lake chips coming with such optimisations, because of an simply accessible reminiscence cache, might make a system boot a lot faster out of sleep or hibernation modes.
Having a big pool of L4 cache obtainable to the built-in graphics, particularly because it might nearly be devoted GPU cache when the system is operating, might do superb issues for the graphics efficiency of a Meteor Lake laptop computer, too. The highest 128 EU Xe GPU tile within the chip might then ship some fairly tasty 1080p gaming efficiency with a little bit additional cache fillip.