Hotter, Hungrier and probably more costly but at least it’ll be readily available.
Intel’s 14th Generation core processors are a joke as we’ve already well established, however Intel hopefully look to at least be turning around their hot and slow image with 14th Generation “Meteor Lake” processors for mobile devices.
Emdoor, a Chinese based company that produces a variety of portable products, from rugged dependable notebooks to tablets and miniature PCs. However the latest trend at this current moment in time is producing handheld PCs to try and capture some of the “buzz” stemming from Valve’s immensely popular Steam Deck.
Everyone wants to get in on the action, what with ASUS and Lenovo both offering “high performance” handheld devices that simply trounce the specifications and capabilities of Valve’s Steam Deck for a lot more money of course, if you want to produce and sell a handheld PC there’s simply no alternative at the moment to AMD’s powerful yet efficient APUs.
However with so much demand on AMD Ryzen APUs, of which both Lenovo and ASUS utilize Ryzen Z1 series processors, companies such as GPD feel as if they’ve been slighted by AMD following an alleged breach of contract in regards to chip supply of Ryzen 7 7840U & Ryzen 5 7640U processors.
So, AMD is the go to for high performance mobility devices, but supply issues are coming through the net thick and thin, this expanding market needs a competitive product and it desperately needs it now.
Intel’s 14th Generation Core processors are more or less split into two, on the desktop side of things we have a full scale refresh of previous generation “Raptor Lake” CPUs, which run slightly more efficient unless otherwise indicated in which case they consume much more power and produce enough heat to boil water.
While Intel’s next actual generational revision comes in the form of “Meteor Lake” on a more advanced processing node, this will only be made available to mobile devices however more than likely stemming from a very immature Intel 4 process, of which Meteor Lake has a regression in terms of its core count, featuring only 6 performance cores and only 8 efficient cores, plus two additional LPE-E cores.
A far cry from the 8+16 combination that’s available today with Raptor Lake and eventually next year with Intel’s 15th Generation “Arrow Lake”.
Emdoor have showcased their own handheld performance PC device equipped with one of the upcoming Meteor Lake-H “Core Ultra” CPUs, featuring a much more advanced integrated ARC graphics solution.
Meteor Lake apparently doesn’t officially launch until December 14th, and it will usher in the new era of Intel Core processors as the company has insisted on rebranding their whole naming scheme to Intel Core 3/5/7 100 – Intel Core Ultra 5/7/9 100.
The Emdoor “EM-GP080MTL” essentially replicates conventional handheld PC design choices as seen on literally any other device from the likes of GPD, Valve, ASUS, Lenovo and AYANEO however it does come with a built-in stand so it’s already by far the most advanced design.
It features an aforementioned Meteor Lake-H series Core Ultra processor with a TDP range of 20-35W, the onboard graphics solution is finally based upon the actual ARC Alchemist series that you can find on discrete graphics card market. This is bound to provide fairly solid iGPU performance bump over previous generation integrated graphics performance.
Although it wasn’t officially disclosed exactly how many “Xe-Cores” would be onboard the Meteor Lake based machine but more than likely it’ll either be either 4 or 8 in total.
For example, AMD’s integrated graphics solution found inside of the Z1 Extreme, the APU inside of the ASUS ROG Ally and Lenovo Legion Go comes with 12 CUs totaling 768 shaders.
Depending on whether or not the Meteor Lake processor inside the Emdoor “console” comes equipped with 4 or 8 Xe-Cores it could feature come with ether 512 or 1024 cores, but more than likely it’ll probably be on the lower end of that spectrum.
It’s entirely good enough to play games such as God of War as per Emdoor’s own video demonstration, of which their machine comes packing a large 8-inch LCD screen with a resolution of 1920×1200 in a 16:10 aspect ratio with over 300 nits peak brightness, though it has not been stated exactly what refresh rate the screen itself was, competing products are offering 120Hz displays for example.
The EM-GP080MTL also comes equipped with 32GB of LDDR5X memory, trouncing the likes of ASUS and Lenovo who offer just 16GB of memory. Clockspeed on the RAM was also not stated.
Don’t expect a vast amount of performance out of these sorts of devices but you’d be certainly surprised the sort of capability you’re able to muster at low resolution gaming, especially with technologies such as Intel XeSS and AMD’s FSR enabled.
But without a doubt it’s almost a certainty that AMD’s current crop of APUs will remain vastly more efficient than Meteor Lake given how the ASUS ROG Ally has a TDP range of 9-30W, and with a full fat 8-core, 16-thread processor on board with superior RDNA 3 based Radeon 780M graphics? It’ll be bound to beat the likes of a Intel based solution with minimal effort.
But that’s not really the point here, this portable handheld PC “console” market is growing by the day, AMD has immensely high demand for its 7000 series Ryzen APUs to the point where they are unable to meet obligations with OEM vendors such as GDP.
This is a serious problem, while the Intel based machine may be trounced in terms of outright performance and especially gaming framerates, so long as they are priced competitively it opens up more opportunities for OEM vendors to utilize Intel Core Ultra CPUs to compete against AMD Ryzen offerings, potentially dropping the prices of these performance machines from increased adoption and competition.
Intel seemingly has to get their head out of their ass and pronto, if Meteor Lake on their new Intel 4 process node, of whom Intel proclaim is on par with cutting edge TSMC’s 3nm process ends up being another overheating lemon the company is almost certainly history, with Arrow Lake highly speculated to provide a laughable 5% single core performance gain over Raptor Lake Refresh.
I want Intel to succeed, I want them to remain competitive with AMD, I was not expecting Meteor Lake based portable devices such as the Emdoor EM-GP080MTL so soon, the performance speculation does not go in favor of Intel but I don’t really care about outright performance, what consumers actually need right now is a goddamn price war, especially when it comes to gouging consumers on overpriced handheld “consoles”.
