Enlarge (credit: Intel)

Intel’s Meteor Lake processor architecture promises to be its most interesting in recent history, but we’ve known for a while now that Intel isn’t planning to launch a version for socketed desktop motherboards like the ones you’d find in a self-built PC or an off-the-shelf mini tower. For those systems, Intel plans to release a second consecutive refresh of the old Alder Lake architecture, the one that first came to desktops in 12th-generation Core CPUs in 2021.

In an interview with PCWorld (via Tom’s Hardware), Intel Client Computing Group General Manager Michelle Johnston Holthaus said that Meteor Lake chips would be coming to desktops after all. But the company backpedaled a bit a couple of days later, clarifying that these Meteor Lake desktop chips would be of the soldered-to-the-motherboard variety, not intended as high-performance replacements for current desktop Core i7 and Core i9 chips.

This kind of bifurcation isn’t totally unheard of, especially when Intel is in the process of shifting to a new manufacturing technology, as it is with Meteor Lake. Chips for high-performance desktops tend to be physically larger and also need to be able to scale up to higher clock speeds, two things that are harder to do when a manufacturing process is new. And Meteor Lake is nothing if not complex to manufacture, using new Intel Foveros packaging technology to combine four different silicon dies produced on three different manufacturing processes by two different companies.