Massive leak details Intel Lunar Lake MX architecture releasing late 2024

Intel already revealed its plans for future processors, confirming that Lunar Lake is to succeed this year’s Meteor Lake mobile processors. Even though Lunar Lake is expected to launch only in Q4 2024, Intel has already shared detailed specs with its investors and partners, and this info was recently leaked on X (Twitter) by YuuKi-AnS, then immediately taken down. Fortunately, nothing is really lost on the Internet, and the slides are still available thanks to Anandtech forum member Geddagod.

What immediately stands out from the leaked slides is the advanced power optimization done for the Lunar Lake chips that have a TDP ranging between 8 and 30 W. Intel is also using a new MX denomination that apparently replaces the U-series. Thus, Lunar Lake MX will be among the first Intel chips to feature memory on package (MoP) along with a more advanced Foveros die that is used for the upcoming Meteor Lake models. The package appears considerably bigger at 27 mm x 27.5 mm and the two DRAM chips will be placed at the top, with either 16 GB or 32 GB LPDDR5X-8533 total capacity. Nevertheless, this design change should reduce power draw by 10% over Meteor Lake, yet it is unclear if laptop integrators can add more RAM on the side.

Additionally, the Lunar Lake MX chips are said to be co-developed with Microsoft for power efficient software-hardware interaction, so these chips should have specific performance optimizations for the upcoming Windows 12 OS.

On the Foveros die side, Intel plans to include a tile with 4 performance cores (Lion Cove) + 4 efficiency cores (Skymont) produced on TSMC’s N3B nodes, along with up to 8 Xe2-LPG graphics cores and an NPU 4.0 AI accelerator. According to the leaked slides, Intel will release only Core 7 and Core 5 models, and the only difference between the two is the number of graphics cores, with Core 5 integrating 7 cores instead of 8. The Xe2-LPG cores are derived from the upcoming Battlemage architecture and also support up to 64 vector engines, systolic AI / super scaling, real time ray tracing and advanced driver optimizations.

The SoC die provides support for platform features such as:

• 4x PCIe 5.0 + 4x PCIe 4.0
• 3x Thunderbolt 4 / USB4 ports with power delivery
• 2x USB-A 3.2 Gen 2
• triple display pipes: HDMI 2.1 + DP 2.1 + eDP 1.4 & 1.5
• Image Processing Unit 7.0 with 16 MP still image capture, 4x concurrent cameras, HDR and temporal noise reduction
• HD audio codec up to 192 kHz / 24-bit, 5-core DSP, USB audio offload
• Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, 1 GbE NIC

As far as TDP goes, Intel mentions that the 8 W version does not require any active cooling, whereas the 17-30 W models need a fan. Videocardz suggests that the Battlemage Xe2-LPG cores can operate at 12 W and offer similar performance to Apple’s M1 iGPU, while the full TGP Xe2-LPG chip may still lag behind Apple’s M2 iGPU.

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