This is Lunar Lake – Intel’s completely overhauled laptop chip with artificial intelligence that erases memory sticks

Last year, Intel boasted that its Meteor Lake processors, called Core Ultra, represented the company’s biggest architectural change in 40 years. But Intel didn’t rest on its laurels: today it’s revealing how Lunar Lake, its next laptop chip coming this fall, will overhaul the formula again.

Faced with the existential threat of Armi and the possibility of artificially intelligent computers, Intel has seemingly abandoned its famous cadence for an all-new system-on-chip design, one that not only triples in size, but also it more than quadruples the performance of its AI. accelerator, but promises up to 14 percent faster CPU performance at the same clock speed, 50 percent more graphics performance, and up to 60 percent better battery life than last year’s model.

“It’s x86 power like you’ve never seen before,” claims Intel technical marketer Rob Hallock, who says Intel tweaked every part of the chip to make it happen. He says it will “definitely” beat Qualcomm as well.

The biggest change? If you buy a Lunar Lake laptop, it won’t have special memory or chips! Lunar Lake now bakes 16 or 32 GB of LPDDR5X memory into the package itself, without the ability to connect more RAM. It’s a change that reduces the power consumption of moving data through the system by roughly 40 percent, according to Intel. For those who need more memory, Hallock says a special Arrow Lake architecture will be coming to laptops later this year.

After hours of looking at slide decks and presentations, plus a quick chat with Hallock, here’s everything else I just learned.

Last year’s Meteor Lake featured a wild “hybrid 3D performance architecture” with the loads of performance (P), efficiency (E) and even a pair of new low power efficiency (LP-E) cores on a separate board called the “low power island”.

That island was built like a smartphone, a first for Intel, with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, display controllers, memory, and those low-power CPU cores. The idea: you could theoretically save battery life by never heating up the other boards and bigger cores unless you’re doing bigger tasks.

But it didn’t work. Apps like Microsoft Teams ended up heating up the entire chip. So Intel is ditching the LP-E cores after just one year – in favor of a new 4 by 4 system. You get up to four new “Lion Cove” P cores and four new “Skymont” E-Cores in one Lunar Lake chip. These 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).

And with a new threading director, Windows can now create “control zones” that actually hold the “most realistic workloads” on Skymont E cores, Microsoft and Intel claim.

“That’s the key to Lunar Lake battery life: we can run more workloads in a lower-power environment on a lower-power core with less stuff on and still give you a excellent user experience,” says Intel Fellow Stephen Robinson.

Microsoft Teams uses 35 percent less power on Lunar Lake thanks to these changes, Intel claims — though Intel says it can’t yet translate that into hours for me.

Similarly, Intel has finally phased out Hyper-Threading because SMT technology eats up more power and real estate than it’s worth. “Adding more cores is a bit more than doubling the circuitry needed to run HT,” admits Hallock, but he says that E-cores are so compact and capable now that HT simply doesn’t make sense anymore.

Speaking of capable E-cores, Intel’s Skymont has another surprise: This year’s E-core is more powerful and efficient than last year’s. P-core at typical laptop clock speeds — with up to 20 percent more single-threaded performance. It just can’t scale up to nearly as many gigahertz:

The four P “Lion Cove” cores, meanwhile, offer a 14 percent performance boost per clock, though Intel wouldn’t provide clock speed numbers so we can really compare. But overall, says Hallock, performance is “generally very up” compared to last year.

In the GPU field, Intel is even more confident: the company says that its Xe2 GPU offers 1.5 times the graphics performance of Meteor Lake (in 3DMark Time Spy), which itself was 2 times higher than the performance of the previous generation. It still has the same number of Xe cores and other functional units, but with a number of performance and efficiency improvements.

And while certainly not all Lunar Lake chips will be created equal, Intel says it didn’t have to split the Xe laptop GPU into two different flavors for lower and higher power: The Xe2 can now scale to the entire spectrum of light and medium weight laptops. by itself. Intel also says that the GPU offers TOP 67 AI performance in addition to the NPU.

Meteor Lake didn’t really kick off the AI ​​laptop generation the way Intel hoped. In fact, you could argue that it left early adopters out in the cold – with AI acceleration worth just 11.5 TOPS, their NPU is a far cry from Microsoft’s 40 TOPS claim for Copilot Plus PCs.

But Lunar Lake triples the amount of NPU hardware on the board, doubles the memory bandwidth, and boosts the clock speed from 1.4GHz to 1.95GHz — delivering up to 48 TOPS and an estimated 2x to 4x overall performance .

Triple device BEN it draws a bit more power, but Intel says it’s significantly faster: just 5.8 seconds for 20 iterations of Sustained Diffusion for Lunar Lake versus 20.9 seconds for Meteor Lake, drawing 11.2 watts instead of 9 watts before.

Intel says its software partners are currently building 350 AI features for PCs to be rolled out by 2025.

• Lunar Lake now supports H.266 VVC video for an additional 10 percent file size reduction over “same quality” AV1.
• You get Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 built into the chip – though it still requires a companion PCIe module for the physical radios and antenna connectors.
• Intel claims it takes 55 percent less time to wirelessly wake up the machine.
• eDP 1.5 with “panel repetition” and other techniques can save up to (emphasis on the “up to”) 351 mW of power by not constantly drawing the same images on the screen.
• There’s a new dedicated Partner Security engine on the chip that’s “effectively Microsoft Pluto,” Intel says, with its own processor, fuse and crypto part.
• Lunar Lake’s onboard memory means that motherboards can and will shrink — “there are some interesting design-winning decisions coming up,” says Hallock.
• The Lunar Lake motherboard is indeed built on TSMC’s N3B processor, with the platform controller on TSMC’s N6, though Intel says it does all the design, assembly and packaging.
• Intel says it can dynamically adjust RAM speed to reduce Wi-Fi interference.
• Intel says it can dynamically adjust the clock speed in 16.67 MHz increments (from 100 MHz) to optimize performance.
• Each Lunar Lake system has two Thunderbolt 4 ports – “You’re guaranteed at least two Thunderbolt 4 ports on every Lunar Lake system you touch,” says Hallock.
• Intel, like Qualcomm, will sell a Mac Mini-like AI PC development kit later this year — one that Intel says will be upgraded to Panther Lake chips when they become available.

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 major PC vendors — though not Microsoft, which chose to go with Qualcomm chips for its Surface Laptop and Surface Pro instead. Intel’s head of customer chips, Michelle Johnston Holthaus, says all 80 models should be available before the holidays this year.