Last year, Intel boasted that its Meteor Lake processors, dubbed Core Ultra<\/a>, represented the company\u2019s biggest architectural shift in 40 years. But Intel didn\u2019t settle down after that: today it\u2019s revealing how Lunar Lake, its next laptop chip coming this fall<\/a>, will overhaul the formula yet again.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Facing the existential threat of Arm<\/a> and the opportunity of AI PCs<\/a>, Intel has apparently ditched its famous tick-tock cadence<\/a> for a whole new system-on-chip design, one that not only triples the size and more than quadruples the performance of its AI accelerator, but promises up to 14 percent faster CPU performance at the same clockspeed, 50 percent more graphics performance, and up to 60 percent better battery life than last year\u2019s model. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cIt\u2019s x86 power like you\u2019ve never seen it before,\u201d claims Intel technical marketer Rob Hallock, who says Intel tweaked every part of the chip to make it happen. He says it\u2019ll \u201cdefinitely\u201d beat Qualcomm<\/a>, too.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The biggest change? If you buy a Lunar Lake laptop, it won\u2019t have separate memory sticks or chips! Lunar Lake now bakes 16 or 32GB of LPDDR5X memory into the package itself, with no ability to connect more RAM. It\u2019s a change that reduces the power consumption of moving data through the system by approximately 40 percent, according to Intel. For those who need more memory, Hallock says a separate Arrow Lake architecture is coming to laptops later this year.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n After hours of poring through slide decks and presentations, plus a quick chat with Hallock, here\u2019s everything else I just learned. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n Last year\u2019s Meteor Lake contained a wild new \u201c3D performance hybrid architecture<\/a>\u201d with loads<\/em> of Performance (P), Efficiency (E), and even a pair of brand-new Low Power Efficiency (LP-E) cores on a separate tile <\/em>dubbed the \u201clow power island.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/div>\n That island was built like a smartphone, a first for Intel, with its own Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, display controllers, memory, and those low-power CPU cores. The idea: you could theoretically save battery life by never heating up other tiles and bigger cores unless you\u2019re doing bigger tasks. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n But it didn\u2019t work. Apps like Microsoft Teams wound up warming the entire chip. So Intel is axing the LP-E cores after only one year \u2014 in favor of a new 4 by 4 system. You get up to four new \u201cLion Cove\u201d P-cores and four new \u201cSkymont\u201d E-Cores in a Lunar Lake chip. Those E-cores now run as fast as an LP-E core at one-third the power, or scale to 2x or 4x the performance (single-threaded vs. multi-threaded). <\/p>\n<\/div>\n And with a new thread director, Windows can now create \u201ccontainment zones\u201d that actually keep \u201cmost real workloads\u201d on the Skymont E-cores, Microsoft and Intel claim. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThis is key to Lunar Lake battery life: we can run more workloads in a lower power environment on a lower power core with fewer things turned on, and still give you a great user experience,\u201d\u00a0says Intel fellow Stephen Robinson.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Microsoft Teams uses 35 percent less power on Lunar Lake thanks to those changes, Intel claims \u2014 though Intel says it can\u2019t yet translate that to hours for me. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n Similarly, Intel has finally axed Hyper-Threading because the SMT technology<\/a> eats more power and real estate than it\u2019s worth. \u201cAdding more cores is slightly more die area\u201d than the doubled portions of circuitry needed to make HT work, Hallock admits, but he says the E-cores are so compact and capable now that HT simply no longer makes sense.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Speaking of capable E-cores, Intel\u2019s Skymont has another surprise: this year\u2019s E-core is more powerful and efficient than last year\u2019s P-core <\/em>at typical laptop clockspeeds \u2014 with up to 20 percent more single-threaded performance. It just can\u2019t scale up to nearly as many gigahertz: <\/p>\n<\/div>\n The four \u201cLion Cove\u201d P-cores, meanwhile, offer a 14 percent performance increase clock for clock, though Intel wouldn\u2019t provide clockspeed numbers so we can truly compare. But overall, says Hallock, performance is \u201cgenerationally very significantly up\u201d compared to last year.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n In the GPU realm, Intel is even more sure of itself: the company says its Xe2 GPU offers 1.5x the graphics performance of Meteor Lake (in 3DMark Time Spy) which itself was 2x the performance of the previous generation. It\u2019s still got the same number of Xe cores and other functional units, but with a variety of performance and efficiency improvements.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n And while assuredly not all Lunar Lake chips will be equal, Intel says it didn\u2019t have to split its Xe laptop GPU into two different flavors for lower and higher wattage: Xe2 can now scale across the spectrum of light and medium-weight laptops all by itself. Intel also says the GPU offers 67 TOPS of AI performance, in addition to the NPU.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Meteor Lake didn\u2019t truly kick off the AI laptop generation the way that Intel hoped. In fact, you could argue it left early adopters in the cold \u2014 with just 11.5 TOPS worth of AI acceleration, their NPU falls far shy of Microsoft\u2019s 40 TOPS requirement for Copilot Plus PCs. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n But Lunar Lake triples the amount of NPU hardware on the die, doubles the memory bandwidth, and boosts the clockspeed from 1.4GHz to 1.95GHz \u2014offering up to 48 TOPS and an estimated 2x to 4x performance overall. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n The tripled hardware does<\/em> draw a little more power, but Intel says it\u2019s substantially faster: just 5.8 seconds for 20 iterations of Stable Diffusion for Lunar Lake vs. 20.9 seconds for Meteor Lake, while pulling 11.2 watts instead of 9 watts previously.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Intel says its software partners are currently building 350 AI features for PCs due through 2025.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Intel says a big wave of Lunar Lake laptops will arrive later this year, with 80 different designs across 20 hardware partners at launch, including all the biggest PC vendors \u2014 though not Microsoft, which chose to go with Qualcomm\u2019s chips for its Surface Laptop<\/a> and Surface Pro instead<\/a>. Intel\u2019s client chip boss Michelle Johnston Holthaus says all 80 designs should be available ahead of the holidays this year.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n8 cores, no hyperthreading<\/h3>\n<\/p>\n
More performance everywhere<\/h3>\n<\/p>\n
A tripled NPU<\/h4>\n<\/p>\n
Everything else that caught my eye or ear<\/h3>\n<\/p>\n
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