Intel's Lunar Lake response to Snapdragon X Elite: Release date and details
Intel has announced the release date for its highly anticipated Lunar Lake laptop processors. The new X86 processors will be available in the third quarter of 2024 and will be compatible with the Copilot Plus PC.
While Microsoft introduced Surface hardware for Copilot Plus PCs using Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite and Plus chips, Intel announced the release date of its Lunar Lake laptop processors that will be compatible with the Copilot Plus PC around the same time. According to Intel, Lunar Lake processors will be available in the third quarter of 2024 and will be able to perform 1.4 times faster than the Snapdragon X Elite.
In addition to up to 40 percent more AI performance, Intel claims that Lunar Lake will also be very strong in battery life and power efficiency. The company says Lunar Lake consumes 20 percent less energy than Qualcomm’s chips and 30 percent less than AMD’s Ryzen 7 7840U. The Lunar Lake family will arrive in the third quarter (July-September), while the next generation of Arrow Lake processors for AI-powered desktops will arrive in the fourth quarter. More details will be shared at Computex 2024 and Intel Tech Tour.
Intel Lunar Lake processors specifications
While full details have yet to be revealed, Arrow Lake will likely utilize the same CPU architectures as Lunar Lake and the company will describe the series as an extension of the Core Ultra family.
Intel’s Lunar Lake CPUs for notebooks build on what was learned from Meteor Lake. Lunar Lake will be the first chip to use a chipset architecture and include an integrated NPU to accelerate AI workloads. In addition, Lunar Lake comes with performance cores (P-cores) using the new Lion Cove microcore architecture and efficiency cores (E-cores) with the Skymont microarchitecture.
For now, model configurations are unclear, but the flagship will use four P-core and four E-Core (4+4) configurations in Lunar Lake. Meanwhile, the production of the CPU tile in the chipset is rumored to be on TSMC N3B bands, but nothing is official for now. As you may recall, Intel included two low-power cores on the SoC tile in the Meteor Lake family. This Low Power Island (LPI) will offer double the processing power with Lunar Lake. These E-core cores are used to maximize energy savings when the system is idle or for small operations.
In the NPU unit, which is the determining factor in AI performance, Lunar Lake will deliver 45 TOPS of performance. This matches Snapdragon X Elite processors and represents a 4-card increase over Meteor Lake. Meanwhile, Copilot Plus PC requires at least 40 TOPS of AI performance. Therefore, laptops using Lunar Lake will have Copilot Plus PC compatibility.
The NPU unit will be used for background and AI workloads, but things are also improving on the GPU side. Lunar’s new integrated GPU will use the Xe2 architecture, which the company will soon use in its next-generation Battlemage graphics cards. This iGPU will take advantage of all the features of the new architecture, including support for Intel Xe Matrix eXtensions (XMX), which is not available on Meteor Lake’s iGPU. Intel says its new Xe2 iGPU will deliver up to 60 TOPS of AI performance, a 3.15x gain over current generation chips. Thus, Lunar Lake will have 100+ TOPS of total AI performance.
Intel also claims that the Xe2 GPU delivers 1.5x more gaming performance than the current generation iGPU in the Meteor Lake Core 7 165U. Intel also says the Lunar Lake CPU is “faster” than the Ryzen 7 8840U and Snapdragon X Elite. However, it provides no concrete evidence to back this up.
Intel also says that Lunar Lake processors will be featured in more than 80 new laptop models by more than 20 laptop makers and that it will ship 40 million AI PC processors by the end of this year.
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