Lunar Lake announcement: Intel throws a wrench of efficient x86 CPUs into Qualcomm's Snapdragon party
Intel can claim to have created the first big mainstream platform for AI PCs with Meteor Lake, but the Neural Processing Unit (NPU) of the current Core Ultra CPUs is rather weak. Its no surprise then that Microsoft is focusing its AI announcements on the 20th of May 2024 onto Qualcomm and the Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus SoCs, which can accelerate AI tasks much faster.
Of course, Intel will not give up the spotlight that easily. This is why Intel is already announcing the new CPU platform Lunar Lake, even though the actual availability is still a few months away. One of the central advantages of Lunar Lake over the existing Meteor Lake CPUs is the much stronger NPU with up to 45 TOPS, matching the one used in the Qualcomm Snapdraon X chips.
That is not all, as Intel Lunar Lake will also improve other parts of the System on a Chip (SoC). The new chips, which are for the first time made completely by TSMC for Intel, are supposed to be much more efficient than anything Intel has released prior.
CPU cores Lion Cove and Skymont, Battlemage GPU
While Intel has used the basically the same CPU core in Meteor Lake that already powered Alder Lake and Raptor Lake, Lunar Lake is introducing a completely new Compute Tile - which is not made by Intel's only foundry, unlike Meteor Lake's CPU tile. Intel did not want to go into detail here, except for the fact that the Core performance will be "faster" than the AMD Ryzen 8840U and Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite and that there will be "significant performance/watt improvements". Also, Intel claims to have more than doubled the performance of the low power SoC Tile, which contains CPU cores as well.
The iGPU is receiving an architectural overhaul as well. For the new Xe2 GPU, which will at some point also enter the market as Battlemage dGPUs, Intel is more open in terms of performance expectations: Its supposed to be 50 percent faster than the Intel Graphics with 4 ARC cores, which is used in recent U series CPUs like the Intel Core Ultra 7 165U. For this comparison, Intel let the Meteor Lake system run at a TDP of 15 W and the Lunar Lake device at 17 W, which includes the power consumption of the memory for Lunar Lake, as the RAM is on the same package as the CPU.
Efficiency: The most important strength of Intel Lunar Lake
In the past, Intel often has increased performance by increasing power consumption. This way of doing things is history with Lunar Lake. Instead, the new platform is supposed to be more power efficient, and massively so. The overall power consumption while running Microsoft Teams and doing a video call is supposed to be 30 percent below the AMD Ryzen 7 7840U. Compared with the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 of the Lenovo ThinkPad X13s, the power consumption is supposed to be 20 percent lower.
Intel Lunar Lake: Many open questions
Intel did not want to divulge much more - benchmarks and real comparisons are still missing, the same is true for SKUs and examples of laptops with Lunar Lake. Intel has invited Notebookcheck to the Intel Tech Tour (ITT) in Taiwan, which takes place in Taiwan next week. If there will be more details to Lunar Lake there, Notebookcheck will certainly report - Intel says that Lunar Lake will enter the market in Q3 2024.
Source(s)
Intel
