Meteor Lake is one of the future generations of CPUs that Intel has confirmed, with a release soon. But for now, and until the manufacturer makes an official statement, all that is said about them are rumors like this, which could be confirmed or denied at any time. Rumors in this story claim that the Meteor Lake generation will include L4 cache, a direct cache layer on the CPU that hasn't been used for several generations.
In the last linux kernel patches, Intel engineers are introducing initial support for the Meteor Lake generation of processors. The changes have seen some interesting potential features, with the L4 being one of them.
Meteor Lake would put a lot of emphasis on the CPU cache
In a patch submitted yesterday, the Intel engineer noted: «In MTL, GT can no longer allocate in LLC - only the CPU can. This, along with the addition of ADM/L4 cache support, requires a MOCS/PAT table update.«This would mean that starting with Meteor Lake, integrated graphics can no longer allocate to the last level cache (LLC), the high-numbered cache that cores access before looking up RAM. Instead, only CPU cores can allocate to it.
In the statements, there is mention of the level 4 (L4) cache of the Meteor Lake platform. For the first time since the Haswell and Broadwell generations, Intel may be planning to bring back the L4 cache and integrate it into the CPU.
For anyone wondering what is the L1, L2 and L3 cache of the CPU. Modern processors use L1, L2, and L3 caches, with the L1 version being the fastest and smallest, while the others are larger but slower. LThe inclusion of L4 caches is usually unnecessary, since this type of cache can consume a large surface area in the processor die with little benefit.. This would greatly increase the manufacturing cost.
Source: Tech Power Up
