Intel has detailed the future of its laptop CPU range called Lunar Lake. This new architecture will replace last year’s Meteor Lake range known as Core Ultra. The company says Lunar Lake will launch later this year.
Of course, Intel is facing a lot of competition from Arm at the moment. There’s also a high demand for AI PCs. Intel has been focusing a lot of its efforts on these two threats and Lunar Lake is supposedly the answer. The new chipset boasts a whole system-on-a-chip design that triples the size of the actual die but at the same time, quadruples the performance of its AI accelerators.
Intel says Lunar Lake promises up to 14% faster CPU performance at the same clock speed and 50% more graphics performance. It also packs up to 60% better battery life than last year’s model. Intel claims “its x86 power like you’ve never seen it before”. The company says it has tweaked every part of the chip to make this possible and it will “definitely” beart Qualcomm.
Intel’s new Lunar Lake is 110% focused on efficiency and battery life with a new 8-core setup. 4 Performance cores and 4 low-power Efficiency cores.
Lunar Lake now packs baked-on LPDDR5X memory. Similar to how Apple has designed its M chips, Lunar Lake won’t include separate memory sticks or chips. When picking up a notebook with Lunar Lake, it will either have 16GB or 32GB of RAM designed into the CPU itself.
You can see from the image below that the Lunar Lake compute tile is built on TSMC’s N3B process node, just like Apple’s M3 chip.
You won’t be able to purchase additional RAM for these notebooks either. Intel says this move speeds up performance while at the same time, reducing power consumption by 40%. Intel is working on its Arrow Lake architecture for those who require more memory. This chip will come with both baked-on RAM as well as the ability to slot extra into the board.
There’s a lot of complicated data surrounding these new chips. However, the basics are seen in the slide below. The chip comes with 1.5x faster graphics performance, more video support, new XMX engines, 8 enhanced ray tracing units and display engines.
Some takeaways from the chips include support for H.266 VVC video, Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 baked into the chip (still requires physical module), 55% improved wake time, the ability to dynamically adjust RAM speed to reduce Wi-Fi interference, minimum of two Thunderbolt 4 ports and the baked-on RAM means smaller boards.
We can expect to see Lunar Lake notebooks appear on the market later this year. Intel plans to ship the chips in September onwards.
