Efficient Intel Lunar Lake multi-core performance rumored to leave Meteor Lake in dust with 50% gain at comparable TDP

Following the launch of the Meteor Lake processors, the Lunar Lake MX (LNL) CPUs are the next products for thin and light machines on Intel's roadmap. According to past leaks, the LNL chips are primarily focused on delivering stellar efficiency and will be limited between 8 and 30 W with 8 W CPUs meant for fan-less designs. Moreover, LNL will reportedly only have an 8-core CPU tile with 4 Lion Cove P-cores and 4 Skymont E-cores and the Core 5 and Core 7 segmentation will depend on the number of cores on the Xe2-LPG iGPU.

Now, thanks to Bionic_Squash on X, we have an exciting Lunar Lake performance update.

Intel Lunar Lake performance

Per the leaker, the 8-core LNL product with 4 P-cores and 4 E-cores will bring a 1.5x multi-core performance increase over the 2 P-core + 8 E-core Meteor Lake-U. This performance uplift will be at 17 W base power vs MTL-U’s 15 W.

Interestingly, the massive multi-threaded performance bump is without any form of Hyperthreading (HT). We have known for a while now, courtesy of numerous leaks, that Intel is moving away from HT in Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake. So, it is nice to know that even without HT, the LNL CPUs allegedly won’t suffer in the performance department.

Additionally, Bionic_Squash reports that a single-fan design is required for LNL CPUs with a 17 W PL1, as passive cooling is only available on lower TDP models. Intel is also supposedly allowing configurable TDP (cTDP) to 30 W due to OEM requests.

Intel Lunar Lake iGPU and NPU

Lunar Lake MX processors are slated to package an Xe2-LPG iGPU based on the next-gen Battlemage architecture with up to 8 Xe cores. According to the newest Lunar Lake leak by Moore’s Law Is Dead, the iGPU on the LNL chips will “attempt to” beat the Meteor Lake iGPU at 50% of the power consumption.

The leaker further reports that some LNL chips are "targeting doubling iGPU performance over MTL at elevated TDPs”. However, the leaker’s source can’t confirm if such LNL products will launch.

Moving on to the NPU performance, MLID quotes one of his sources claiming that LNL NPU could be “above 40 TOPs”. If true, this would be a massive increase over the 3rd Gen NPU inside MTL which reportedly delivers 10 TOPs of performance and AMD Ryzen 8040 Hawk Point’s XDNA NPU which brings 16 TOPs.

Long story short, the Intel Lunar Lake MX processors could finally bring both a decent performance increase and a notable efficiency improvement, something which the Meteor Lake processors failed to deliver. But rumors and leaks don’t often paint the full picture, so take the information discussed here with a grain of salt.

Buy the Acer Swift Go 14 OLED with Intel Core Ultra 7 155H on Amazon