Intel to integrate 3D-stacked cache in upcoming CPUs, demos AI on Lunar Lake laptops and confirms Panther Lake for 2025

While the main “attraction” of this year’s Intel Innovation event was the Meteor Lake Core Ultra mobile CPU launch, Team Blue also shared more info on future lineups, including a demo showcasing the AI capabilities Lunar Lake processors launching in a year, and answered some burning questions from the press as well.

Some early Lunar Lake samples that will succeed the upcoming Meteor Lake were demonstrated running with no issues on a couple of laptops during the keynote. The Lunar Lake processors will be the first to integrate compute tile with specialized AI accelerators. These AI tiles together with the CPU ones featuring Lion Cove P-cores and Skymont E-cores are to be fabricated on the 18A nodes. One of the laptops ran the Audacity audio app with the Refusion AI plugin and was able to generate a short song sample reproducing Taylor Swift’s style in just 10 seconds. The other laptop ran the GIMP image app coupled with a Stable Diffusion text-to-image AI plugin which created an image of a giraffe in a cowboy hat. Both instances used locally-installed AI models.

As far as future models go, an updated roadmap was shown depicting Arrow Lake, followed by Lunar Lake for 2024, and Panther Lake for 2025. Arrow Lake is more or less the desktop version of Meteor Lake, just as Panther Lake is the desktop version of Lunar Lake. However, Panther Lake will have all of its tiles fabricated on the 18A nodes, going into production in Q1 2024, and Intel is expected to include more powerful Cougar Cove P-cores on these models. From Arrow Lake onwards, all desktop CPU lineups will require a new LGA-1851 socket.

Last and probably the most interesting bit came during the post-keynote Q&A session, when CEO Pat Gelsinger revealed that Intel would adopt something similar to AMD’s 3D V-Cache for upcoming processors following Meteor Lake. It is probably developed in collaboration with TSMC, since Intel is already outsourcing some of the Meteor Lake tiles through the Taiwanese foundries, yet it would be designed to be compatible with the Foveros technology. As Gelsinger puts it, “[...] that particular type of technology isn't something that's part of Meteor Lake, but in our roadmap, you're seeing the idea of 3D silicon where we'll have cache on one die, and we'll have CPU compute on the stacked die on top of it, and obviously using EMIB that Foveros we'll be able to compose different capabilities.”

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