That's an interesting thought as well. My feeling has been they are getting low yields out of Intel 4 at this stage, so salvage more content and use it in the low end (i5 and lower), but I suppose if the wafer yield is low, but the content is higher quality, they could use it to service the high end only (i7 and i9).
All just pure speculation at this point. We should know for sure in about a month or two.
Indeed those are speculation, and theories. But you have a point. Few of my own sources have confirmed this as well. Meteor Lake-S has likely been on a roller coaster because of 4nm (Intel 4 ?) yield issues, prompting the chipmaker to focus on the lucrative notebook market first.
And when it comes to the second prediction, some of the existing Meteor Lake-S dies might be used by Intel and its partners to
validate the Arrow Lake-S CPUs. We know both these chips are going to support the same mobo socket, most likely LGA1851.
So, it is possible that some variants of Meteor Lake architecture might end up being offered alongside future Arrow Lake CPUs for the LGA-1851 socket, or maybe these are just preliminary Arrow Lake chips in disguise.
OR, Intel might just be testing these chips by releasing lower-end SKUs for the RPL-refresh family first,
before releasing them on a full scale on the Arrow Lake lineup ?
https://designintools.intel.com/lga1851-mtl-s-interposer-for-the-gen5-vr-test-tool.html
But anyway, not sure about all that speculation, but, recently a test tool for Intel's Meteor Lake-S CPUs appeared on the blue team's designintools portal which may indicate a desktop launch.
The new LGA1851-MTL-S CPU interposer was discovered by
momomo_us, which appeared to be an internal testing tool provided to customers and partners who are receiving the first samples for testing.
It was ALSO recently stated that Intel was
sampling its first Meteor Lake-S Desktop CPUs to OEMs. But this was debunked later on.