Intel's 15th gen Lunar Lake architecture leaks with Lion Cove+ P-cores, Xe2 iGPU, and possible lack of Hyperthreading

Back in January, Intel revealed that the Lunar Lake (LNL) architecture is being designed for ultrathin laptops with the aim of preserving performance while ensuring all-day battery life. As such, the LNL CPUs are said to target a 15 W or below TDP. Furthermore, it is expected that the Lunar Lake chips will employ an Xe2-LPG iGPU based on the next-gen Battlemage architecture. Adding to the growing pile of Lunar Lake leaks, Moore’s Law Is Dead and Bioinic_Squash have ousted more details regarding the architecture.

For starters, MLID suggests that the Lunar Lake CPUs will top out at 8 cores with 4 Lion Cove+ P-cores and 4 Skymont E-cores. The leaker calls the LNL Lion Cove+ P-cores an “early implementation”. The leaker also mentions that the LNL processors may not get “working Rentable Units” that are expected to appear in Arrow Lake chips.

Furthermore, MLID alleges that the “current Plan of Records” for LNL chips suggests a GPU tile based on the Intel Arc Battlemage. To that end, Bionic_Squash on Twitter reports that the LNL iGPU features 64 Xe2 Execution Units (EU) and 8 Xe2 cores. Sadly, we have no idea of the performance of these Xe2 cores. 

That said, it could be helpful to recall that, according to a recent Arrow Lake performance leak, the Xe-LPG featured inside the ARL-S CPUs is up to 2.4x as speedy as an Intel HD 770. So, it won’t be surprising seeing the Xe2-LPG iGPU inside LNL processors massively outperform the current crop of Intel mobile graphics.

Buy the Intel Core i5-13600K on Amazon