A year has passed since Intel introduced us to its new generation of Meteor Lake processors, a family of chips that in terms of hardware aim to represent the beginning of a new hour for the company.
But no change of this magnitude comes without sacrifices and everything indicates that we will lose two big ones: processors Intel Core i7 y los Intel Core i5.
Throughout more than two decades we have seen how the company has built its chip catalog around these two benchmarks of processing power and speed.
There were also other less powerful classes of processors, such as the Celeron range and the Core i3. But actually over time it was the i5 and i7 that ended up becoming a sign of reliability for processing support.
But evolution and constant changes are essential in this industry, so now the firm has revealed its plans to finally discontinue both ranges of chips to usher in a new era.
This is how Intel’s Meteor Lake will kill the Core i5 and Core i7
First the most basic. Broadly speaking, we have two future families of computer chips that the company will implement in the short and medium term. First to the Intel range are Meteor Lake, the brand’s first product with 4-nanometer architecture, it will be based on the “Intel 4” process node and will have a new tile architecture, hybrid cores, lower power consumption, a next-generation graphics engine and built-in Artificial Intelligence (AI) acceleration; and then there’s Arrow Lake, which will debut the new Intel 20A technology.
For both cases, the firm hopes that these two new products will improve the performance of the XPU with a cross-processor architecture that assigns applications and processes to different chips, while also opening the ground for the integration of AI systems. Meteor Lake will launch in 2023, while Arrow Lake will launch in 2024.
Under such a scenario, the company could be discontinuing the well-known Intel Core i5 and Intel Core i7 processors, since according to the company’s own statements in its most recent conference with investors (via Trusted Reviews) their top priority would be to push these two new generations, particularly to Meteor Lake.
So now rumors suggest that the next chips in that family will abandon the “Core i” naming scheme to replace them with the new “Core Ultra” nomenclature.
But for now, the Meteor Lake family chips for desktop PCs are expected to be limited to the range of Core i3 and Core i5 processors with power consumption around 35W and 65W.
