Lunar Lake Skymont E-cores could have IPC in ballpark of AMD Zen 3 as official details shared by Intel surface

Intel announced “Lunar Lake”, the company’s next-gen architecture for thin and light laptops, earlier this month. During the announcement, Team Blue doubled down on the efficiency of Lunar Lake, claiming that the architecture consumes 30% lower power than the Ryzen 7 7840U when running Microsoft Teams Conferencing (3x3).

Additionally, Intel also claimed, without mentioning any figures, that the “core performance” of the Lunar Lake Core Ultra 200V chips would be higher than the Ryzen 7 8840U and the Snapdragon X Elite. This purported increase in core performance is the result of brand-new Lion Cove P-cores and Skymont E-cores.

Now, thanks to a leak from a closed-door press briefing regarding Lunar Lake, we have an idea about the performance advantage of Skymont E-cores over Crestmont E-cores found inside the Meteor Lake CPUs.

According to slides reportedly shown to the press by Intel, Lunar Lake’s Skymont-E cores have a double-digit IPC advantage vs the Crestmont E-cores. If true, the Skymont E-cores would bring a bigger performance jump than what we saw with Crestmont E-cores vs Alder Lake/Raptor Lake’s Gracemont E-cores. TechPowerUp estimates that the Skymont E-cores should match the IPC of Willow Cove of Tiger Lake and, consequently, be in the ballpark of the AMD Zen 3 IPC.

So, how is Intel managing a double-digit IPC jump with Skymont?

It appears that the IPC bump is the result of hardware improvements such as:

• 9-wide Decode unit vs 6-wide in previous gen
• Better branch prediction
• 80-wide Integer ALU vs 4-wide ALU of Crestmont

In addition to the performance of Skymont, Intel also reportedly revealed during the presentation that Lunar Lake’s CPU and SoC tiles will be manufactured by TSMC using the N3B and N6 processes respectively. The news of TSMC N3B confirms a leak from back in November 2023 which ousted a ton of details about Lunar Lake. Similarly, Intel also apparently confirmed in its press briefing that there would be no SoC cores on Lunar Lake chips which matches a previous report about Arrow Lake lacking SoC cores (ARL and LNL seem to have the same CPU architecture).

Finally, the first laptops powered by the Core Ultra 200V Lunar Lake chips are slated to arrive in October. So, we only have to wait a few more months to find out how well the Lunar Lake processors perform in relation to AMD and Qualcomm’s offerings.

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