Intel’s Core Ultra was something of big news last year and the Core Ultra powered laptops are slowly taking pace. But wait, Intel had something more interesting under its sleeves, the “Lunar Lake”. Which has finally been announced as the next lineup of laptop chips, arriving this autumn with powerful AI and inbuilt RAM. Without further ado, let’s delve into the news surrounding Intel Lunar Lake in this article.
Intel Lunar Lake Overview
A bigger size and bigger performance
The Intel Lunar Lake is a bigger system-on-chip which is triple the size of its predecessor. With the increase in size, Intel is also claiming a four-times acceleration in AI performance and 14-times faster CPU performance. The Lunar Lake chips also bear a 50% graphical performance boost and up to 60% better battery life.
Intel’s technical marketer Rob Hallock says, “It’s x86 power like you’ve never seen it before.” He also mentions that every part of the Lunar Lake chip has been tweaked to gain such a boost on both performance and battery. Seems like the AI CPU race is going to get tougher for Qualcomm as Hallock is confident enough for the Lunar Lake chip to beat it.
8 cores architecture
Unlike the Meteor Lake processors, the Lunar Lake chips will stick to the old 8-core architectures. So, there won’t be any hyperthreading here. Four “Skymont” energy-efficient cores and four “Lion Cove” power-centric cores and that’s it. The E-cores here are claimed to run as fast as an LP-E core of the Core Ultra processors, at one-third the power. Intel has also included a new thread director that can keep the most workloads on the E-core for efficient operation.
Graphical Performance and NPU
Moving to the graphical section, the Xe2 GPU offers 1.5X the performance of Meteor Lake in 3DMark Time Spy benchmarks. The core count of Xe and other functional units are the same on the Lunar Lake but, Intel claims overall performance and efficiency improvements. Likewise, the GPU offers 67 TOPS of AI performance as well.
Talking of the NPU, the Lunar Lake chip brings a major improvement with 48 TOPS of AI acceleration over the Meteor Lake generation. The latter only brought 11.5 TOPS of AI acceleration failing the need for 40 TOPS requirement for Microsoft’s Copilot Plus PCs. The clock speed on the new processor has been boosted to 1.95GHz from 1.4GHz, contributing to 2x to 4x overall performance.
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No Physical RAM
The Lunar Lake guys feature a peculiar change. There won’t be separate memory sticks or chips but a LPDDR5X RAM will be embedded with the chip. Intel is planning to offer 16 or 32 gigs of memory, preventing the user from adding any more RAM. This move is all for reducing power consumption by up to 40% of moving data through the system as per Intel. So, no more physical RAM for Intel laptops? Well, Intel has a backup for that as well. It will introduce Arrow Lake architecture which will allow physical RAM as well.
Intel Lunar Lake Launch and Availability
Intel Lunar Lake-powered laptops will arrive this fall of 2024 with 80 different designs across 20 hardware partners.
- Meanwhile, you can check the Intel Arc Laptop video.
