New Intel Lunar Lake chips promise significant AI gains and energy savings

Intel Core Ultra 100 (Meteor Lake) processors were advertised as groundbreaking but did not meet expectations. They did not bring a significant performance increase and often lost to the competition. Their only asset was a dedicated NPU accelerator supporting artificial intelligence tasks.

However, Intel is not giving up quickly and is already working on the next generation of mobile processors. The new Intel Core Ultra 200 models are set to appear in the third quarter of this year, and the manufacturer has already revealed the first details.

Intel Lunar Lake processors will feature an entirely new design. The company will implement a chiplet configuration (separate silicon cores) produced using various lithographic processes. Previous information pointed to Intel 18A lithography and technology provided by an external foundry.

We will still deal with a hybrid architecture combining two types of cores: new P-Core cores based on the Lion Cove architecture and E-Core cores based on the Skymont architecture. The manufacturer boasts improved IPC (instructions executed per clock cycle) and energy efficiency, but details have not yet been disclosed.

An additional advantage will be the new integrated graphics based on the Xe2 (Battlemage) architecture. This graphics solution will be equipped with Intel XMX (Xe Matrix Extensions) hardware units supporting artificial intelligence tasks.

The manufacturer particularly boasts the new processors' capabilities in applications related to artificial intelligence. The Lunar Lake processors are expected to deliver performance at 100 TOPS. In practice, the NPU unit is expected to provide the performance of 45 TOPS (three times higher than in the Meteor Lake models), and the graphics will add another 60 TOPS.

We will have to wait for detailed performance tests, but the manufacturer has given us a glimpse by comparing the capabilities of the new processors to competing models.

The new processors are expected to provide better core performance compared to AMD Ryzen 7 8840U and Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite models. By how much exactly? That is unclear. On the other hand, the graphics are expected to be 1.5 times more efficient than in previous models, although it is unknown how they compare to the competition.

The new units are also expected to bring significant improvements in energy efficiency. The manufacturer boasts that an example laptop with a Lunar Lake processor, during a conference on Microsoft Teams, will use 30% less energy than a laptop with a competing AMD Ryzen 7 7840U processor and 20% less than a laptop with a Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 processor. However, we are still waiting for the release of notebooks with Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite processors.

What will it be like in reality? We will find out in the third quarter of 2024 when the first laptops with Intel Lunar Lake processors hit the market, and we will be able to assess the final product.

In the next quarter, we will also see the release of Intel Arrow Lake processors for desktop computers.