While Microsoft has chosen to highlight the arrival of ARM SoCs under Windows, Intel has announced that these Lunar Lake processors, designed for portable PCs, will arrive in the third quarter of this year. This statement is no coincidence, since in addition to the AI buzz, Microsoft has been touting the autonomy of its new Surface range, equipped with ARM Snapdragon X Elite SoCs. Intel announced some time ago that this new generation would deliver a huge leap in performance at launch, with a drastic reduction in power consumption.
Starting in the third quarter of 2024, in time for the holiday season, the next Intel Lunar Lake processors will power more than 80 new notebook models from over 20 OEMs, delivering AI performance on a global scale for Copilot PCs . Lunar Lake will add Copilot experiences, such as Recall, via an update when available. Building on the success of Intel Core Ultra processors and with the addition of Lunar Lake, Intel will ship more than 40 million AI processors for PCs this year.
Lunar Lake: a SoC capable of beating ARM and APPLE to the punch?
In terms of performance, gains are expected across the board. Intel will be launching a new processor core architecture, P-Core (Lion Cove) and E-Core (Skymont). Lunar Lake features a new GPU architecture (Xe2) and a new NPU.
Added to this is Intel’s innovative3D packaging technology and the most advanced manufacturing processes on the market. In effect, we should have AI-accelerating power to take advantage of Microsoft Copilot . Lunar Lake will deliver over 100 TOPS of power. Its NPU will deliver more than 40 TOPS, while the GPU will add a further 60 TOPS to the final AI acceleration performance. The theoretical maximum would be around 105 TOPS.
The other expected gain concerns graphics. Lunar Lake will benefit from Battlemage architecture, an evolution that promises 50% extra performance in 3DMark Time Spy for a SoC with a TDP of just 17W. On the CPU side, each core promises to be faster than the Zen 4 of the Ryzen 8840U and the Oryon of the Snapdragon X Elite.
But it’s clearly in terms of energy efficiency that all eyes will turn. Some tests suggest the potential of the new chips in this respect. Intel reports that its Intel Lunar Lake processor consumes 30% less energy than an AMD Ryzen 7 7840U, and up to 20% less than an Arm SoC such as the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3.
So we’ll have to wait until the start of the 2024-2025 school year to get our first idea of these chips. One thing is certain, however: the battle for mobility has been relaunched.
