Intel Lunar Lake is here to take Copilot+ PC and AI by storm
The biggest shake up for PCs ever
🤖 Intel Lunar Lake processors pack a whopping 120 TOPs of AI performance
🧠 Integrated memory for the first time in an Intel processor
🎮 Xe2 GPU promises 50% more graphical power and better ray tracing
💪 Lunar Lake packs four P-core and four E-core
🛜 Built-in support for Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, and 1GB Ethernet
Intel teased its next-generation CPUs ahead of Computex 2024 and now we have the full details on the Lunar Lake processors coming in 2024 laptops later this year.
Lunar Lake is a major paradigm shift for Intel processors. Firstly the chip now features an eight-core hybrid design with four new Lion Cove performance-cores and four Skymont efficiency-cores. That completely cuts out the low-energy efficiency cores Intel introduced with its last generation Meteor Lake chips, which utilized a 12-core structure of two P-cores, eight E-cores, and 2 LP E-cores.
Lunar Lake is also the first processor from Intel that won’t utilize hyper-threading in 22 years. Intel is instead pushing more workloads to its E-cores to better utilize them while the P-cores do the hard work.
Intel’s new Lunar Lake processors are also the first to come with integrated memory. Whether that prevents you from adding more laptop memory on top of the RAM comes built into the processor itself is still a mystery as Intel and the multiple laptop manufactuers I’ve spoken to haven’t stated anything concrete on the subject.
Lunar Lake processors can come with up to 64GB of LPDDR5X RAM, however, Intel hasn’t revealed how it plans to divvy up memory capacities among its different CPU SKUs. Lower memory capacities are likely to sit around 16GB, as that’s a requirement for Microsoft’s new Copilot+ PC branding.
Intel has also gone all in on AI with Lunar Lake so much that every part of the chip can contribute to its total TOPs performance for AI operations. For starters, the new NPU delivers a much greater 48 TOPs – up from the 10 TOPs from the Intel Meteor Lake’s NPU. The GPU can also power AI with 67 TOPs and the CPU itself can push 5 TOPs, giving users a total of 120 TOPs altogether compared to Meteor Lake’s total of 34 TOPs.
That also crushes Snapdragon X Plus and Elite’s 45 TOPs, so we’ll have to see if Qualcomm introduces a Plus Ultra chip or another to counter Intel’s latest announcement.
Speaking of graphics, Lunar Lake also comes with Intel’s latest Xe2 GPU, packing eight next-generation Xe cores and eight ray tracing units. Intel promises its new Xe2 graphics can deliver up to 50% higher performance, plus a higher efficiency overall compared to the Xe graphics in Meteor Lake.
With the beefier graphics, Lunar Lake laptops can support up to three displays at once including three 4K 60fps HDR monitors. We’ve yet to see how much better gaming performance you can squeeze out of Xe2, but Intel has shown a demo of F1 2024 being upscaled with XeSS from 1080p to 4K on a TV running at 120Hz.
Lunar Lake also brings several platform upgrades. The new chipset comes with Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 built-in, and support for 1GB Ethernet wired connections. Intel demoed several ways Wi-Fi 7 could greatly improve game streaming by optimizing bandwidth lanes for the smoothest gaming experience.
Intel also plans to introduce a Wi-Fi Sensing feature to wake your PC from sleep when it detects you’re nearby. This feature works by creating a wireless net with the laptop’s two Wi-Fi 7 radios, and when the user steps into it they create a disturbance that the processor can read as a Doppler effect.
Lastly, Lunar Lake also adds AV1 encoding and decoding plus VVC decode to PCs as well to help save power on video editing and streaming.
Kevin Lee is The Shortcut’s Creative Director and a gaming handheld aficionado. Follow him on Twitter @baggingspam.