The arrival of Intel’s new Lunar Lake processors is eagerly awaited. This new generation of ultrabook processors comes with profound changes that should confirm Intel’s return to PC mobility. The first special feature of Lunar Lake is that it will embed Ram in the same way as Apple Silicon SoCs. Intel will use a Foveros 3D “package” to stack the DRAM arrays on the SoC. This reduces the complexity of the motherboard, but limits modularity: goodbye so-dimm bars on Lunar Lake-equipped PCs. However, let’s face it, in 95% of cases, ultrabooks are impossible to upgrade in this respect (soldered ram). In this case, we should be able to choose between LPDDR5X 16GB or 32GB MoP (Memory-on-Package) versions. So, to put it simply, on these chips we’ll have the system’s CPU, GPU, NPU and RAM.
Interestingly, all Lunar Lake variants will feature the same number of cores (4P 4LPE). Segmentation will be based on clock speed and L3 cache. The iGPU on low-end models will also be reduced. Fanless designs will have a TDP of 15 W to 28 W, while others will range from 17 W to 30 W. As we’ve already mentioned, hyperthreading will be a thing of the past on these processors, which will also benefit from new Xe2 graphics cores, which should enable Intel to catch up here too.
Rumors regularly mention a performance gain of almost 50% over the Meteor Lake versions. So far, Intel has officially said nothing, other than to boast of a quantum leap in NPU power (which, for the time being, nobody cares about). Computex could be the scene of some clarification for both AMD and Intel. However, the first notebooks equipped with Lunar Lake are scheduled for the end of 2024.
Lunar Lake technical details:
- Core P: 4 Core Lion Cove
- Core LPE: 4 Core Skymont
- Number of processor cores: 8 (4P 4LPE).
- Base clock: 1.8 GHz-2.10 GHz.
- L2 cache: 2.5 MB per P core, 14 MB total.
- L3 cache: 14 MB (shared).
- Memory: 32 GB LPDDR5x-8533 / 16 GB possible (rumor)
- TDP: 17W-30W.
- GPU uArch : ARC Battlemage.
- Xe cores: 8.
- Vector engines: 64 (SIMD16).
- Number of shaders: 1024.
- GPU clock: ~2 GHz ?
