Intel shared details about its upcoming Lunar Lake processor, which will power laptops by the end of 2024. Lunar Lake is a major overhaul that comes right after Intel’s Core Ultra (Meteor Lake), which the company called its biggest architectural shift in 40 years.<\/p>\n
Lunar Lake is a new system-on-chip design that promises 14% faster CPU performance at the same clock speed, a 50% bump in graphics performance, and up to 60% better battery life than Meteor Lake.<\/p>\n
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Lunar Lake is built not on an Intel process (because Intel is working on its 1.8nm EUV 18A node), but on TSMC’s 3nm node – N3 for the compute tile, and N6 for the platform tile.<\/p>\n
The first big change compared to the previous Intel mobile chip is the RAM. It’s now baked into the package itself – you can either choose 16GB or 32GB of LPDDR5X RAM and it can’t be upgraded later on.<\/p>\n
The other big changes are the Efficiency cores and the move away from hyperthreading. Meteor Lake brought low-power efficiency (LP-E) cores alongside the efficiency (E) and performance (P) cores to pursue better battery life. But that seemingly didn’t work, so it’s axing the configuration with Lunar Lake, instead opting for a split between four new “Lion Cove” P cores and four new “Skymont E cores”.<\/p>\n
Dropping hyperthreading reportedly doesn’t hurt performance – Intel claims up to 1.5 times better performance at a comparable draw to Meteor Lake. Per Intel, the “Lion Cove” P cores bring a 50% performance-per-watt improvement, and around 20% to 80% from the “Skymont” E cores. In fact, the new “Skymont” E cores offer around 2% instructions-per-clock improvement over Raptor Lake’s P core design – you read that right – Intel’s Lunar Lake efficiency cores are faster per clock than Raptor Lake’s performance cores.<\/p>\n
This improvement reportedly comes from the added cache, the new process node, and the new architectural design.<\/p>\n
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Graphics-wise, Lunar Lake brings Xe2 graphics with up to 60 TOPS (tera operations per second), which will essentially make entry-level GPUs redundant. Intel claims a 1.5x improvement over the Xe GPU in Meteor Lake.<\/p>\n
Finally, let’s address AI. Lunar Lake triples the NPU die, doubles the memory bandwidth, and boosts the clock from 1.4GHz to 1.95GHz. That results in a boost from the 11.5 TOPS of Meteor Lake to 48 TOPS in Lunar Lake.<\/p>\n
Intel says the added power draw is mitigated by the speed advantage – just 5.8 seconds for 20 iterations of Stable Diffusion vs 20.9 seconds on the previous chip.<\/p>\n
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Intel aims for an end-of-2024 release for Lunar Lake. It supports PCI-Express 5, Thunderbolt 4 and USB4. HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort 2.1, Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, and Gigabit Ethernet.<\/p>\n