While it appears that with "Intel 4" Intel has succeeded to reduce the power consumption to be competitive with the CPUs made in older TSMC processes, like the AMD CPUs, history has repeated and exactly like at the launch of the "14 nm" Intel process in 2014 and at the launch of the "10 nm" Intel process in 2018 and 2019, Intel is unable to achieve in the new manufacturing processes clock frequencies as high as in their previous mature manufacturing process.

Because the P-cores of Meteor Lake have the same microarchitecture as the P-cores of Alder Lake and Raptor Lake, but a lower turbo clock frequency, they have a lower single-thread performance.

Nevertheless, the Meteor Lake E-cores are improved and the clock frequency when all cores are active is higher for Meteor Lake, due to the improved power efficiency, so the multi-threaded performance of Meteor Lake is better than in the previous Intel CPUs.

The best part of Meteor Lake is the GPU made at TSMC, which has 4/3 times more FP32 execution units than AMD Phoenix or Hawk Point at a clock frequency that is higher than 3/4 of the AMD frequency, so the Intel iGPU is faster than the AMD iGPU, and it is twice faster than the older Intel iGPUs.

The other nice feature of Meteor Lake is that the SoC tile (made by TSMC) includes everything that is needed when a computer is mostly idle, like when reading documents or watching movies, so in such cases both the CPU tile with 6+8 faster cores and the GPU tile with the 3D graphics can be completely shut down, leading to a great reduction in the power consumption for anything that can be handled by the two slowest cores and by the video display engine.

For consumers who do not need the higher performance of 45 W CPUs, laptop or SFF computers with Meteor Lake are a great choice.

While one model of 45 W Meteor Lake will be available some time later (Core Ultra 9), it will likely be too expensive and too hard to find in comparison with the 45-W AMD CPUs.