Intel was apparently advanced in its desktop Meteor Lake-based Core Ultra 100 CPUs before cancelling them. One such chip has been spotted by Asian media housing 14 cores without hyperthreading. The processor seemed to run fine, able to boot into the operating system and run software.
IT Home has obtained pictures and screenshots of a presumed Intel Core Ultra 100 CPU packing six P-cores plus eight E-cores clocked at 2.8GHz base and 4.5GHz boost. Simply marked as Q46W, this processor was detected as a Meteor Lake engineering sample compatible with the current LGA1851 socket. For reference, the Meteor Lake architecture was only offered on mobile devices under the Core Ultra 100 Series, available in U and H variants.
Unlike mobile Core Ultra 100 CPUs, these desktop ones lack hyperthreading which is a change that debuted with Arrow Lake. This unit was apparently manufactured in December 2023 after cancellation rumours started, with others as recent as early 2024. While CPU-Z wasn’t able to identify the model, based on its core configuration and cache amount, this could be a Core Ultra 5 145. However, AIDA64 did indicate that this is a 65W chip with a PL2 (Power Limit 2) of 135W, which sounds about right.
Though not the best way to compare performance, the processor was tested using CPU-Z’s validation tool, delivering 732.3 single-core and 5760.2 multi-core points. This puts it around a Ryzen 5 7600X / Core i7-12700F in single-core and a Ryzen 7 5700X3D / Core i9-9900KS in multi-core.
IT Home source has indicated that a seller is in possession of a batch of these chips, but potential buyers will need a special motherboard capable of detecting and running these unreleased models. Such CPUs are generally cheaper than the officially launched ones, so they may be worth jumping through all these hoops.
Depending on the number Intel manufactured before cancelling everything, we may see more of these pop up in the future on Chinese retail platforms. Perhaps someone may buy one to put it through its paces and show us what we have missed with this series.
