Intel recently announced that its next-generation mobile CPU series, Lunar Lake, is on track for launch in Q3 2024. The CPU is expected to carry on the AI momentum of Meteor Lake, with the chipmaker having described it as the “Next Gen of AI PC”.
As is the case with generational upgrades and improvements, Lunar Lake will feature new P-Cores, E-Cores, and low-power island E-Cores. Still, on a slightly more important note, it is expected to be the first mobile processor to ship out with Intel’s new ARC Battlemage GPU cores, or Xe2 cores. Additionally, it’ll also feature a new NPU with a performance output of more than 45 TOPS, which is more or less on par with Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X Series ARM-based processors.
It should be noted that Lunar Lake will still be made using Intel’s Foveros packaging, which it announced back with Meteor Lake last year. The chipmaker has said that it intends to use the packaging for several generations, at least until it reaches the 18A process, also referred to as the “Angstrom” era, which is a direct reference to the metric unit of length. That said, it should also be noted that Intel didn’t specify which process node it is using with Lunar Lake.
And while performance metrics aren’t readily available, Intel claims that the power efficiency of its Lunar Lake chips will be up to 30% lower than the AMD Ryzen 7 7840U series, and up to 20% lower compared to the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 chipsets. To that end, the onboard Battlemage GPU will be at least 50% more powerful than the Alchemist cores in Meteor Lake CPUs, and will be up to 40% faster in AI performance, compared to the Snapdragon X Elite.
It is a bit surprising that Intel is actually releasing Lunar Lake well before Arrow Lake. Traditionally, the blue chipmaker has always released its desktop lineup well before the mobile series. It actually raised a lot of interesting questions over how it managed to procure materials to produce mobile parts. In any case, we’re likely to see several laptops rocking the processor on display during Computex later this year.
(Source: Intel, Anandtech)
