Antonio Cahun
My love for technology began when I first touched an NES at age 6. Metalhead and otaku, One Piece fan. I started technology writing as a hobby, but now it’s how I make a living. You can follow me on X (Twitter) and on Instagram, where every day I publish stories from my daily life. LinkedIn
The new Intel Lunar Lake processors are here. With its new chips, Intel promises to improve every aspect of the next laptops that will hit the market before the end of 2024. More importantly, the Lunar Lake processors promise to bring artificial intelligence to new generation laptops.
The Lunar Lake processors will be in charge of giving life to the “age of AI PCs”. The pillars that will support the new generation of laptops, in addition to AI, will be more power, better energy efficiency and better graphics performanceaccording to Intel.
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Laptops will be more capable than ever thanks to Lunar Lake
With Lunar Lake processors, Intel’s focus is on the lowest possible power consumption and AI integration. These are the foundations to build its pillars and achieve its promise of more capable laptops.
Lunar Lake processors will be manufactured in TSMC’s 3nm 3NB process, its main manufacturing partner. The most interesting thing is that they have a three-dimensional design. tilesor sectors, structure inherited from Meteor Lake processors: the first is memory, the second is processing, and the third is platform drivers. Integrated memory, for the first time in Intel processors, has support for up to 32 GB LPDDR5X; and the controller sector integrates engines and security components, for Bluetooth 5.4 and Wi-Fi 7 wireless connectivity, and components for Thunderbolt 4, PCIe Gen 4 and Gen 5 wired connectivity, as well as USB 3.0 and USB 2.0.
Of course, the most important sector is processing. It is the largest as it integrates all the CPU components for power, GPU for graphic performance, and NPU for artificial intelligence.
Lunar Lake processors have what Intel calls “hybrid design” eight core: four cores performance (P-cores) with the Lion Cove microarchitecture, and four cores of efficiency (E-cores) with the Skymont microarchitecture. This structure achieves “the best performance and maximum efficiency”explains Intel.
Lion Cove cores offer 14% better performance single thread Compared to the previous generation Redmoond Cove on Meteor Lake processors, they have support for up to 12 MB of shared L3 cache, and 2.5 MB of L2 cache per core. Intel claims Lion Cove is its best-performing and most efficient CPU core architecture yet.
The statement is based, more than on a huge increase in power, on the fact that Lion Cove cores perform better with lower power consumption than previous generation. Among the measures to achieve this is a new AI-based controller for energy management that “adapts in real time depending on operating conditions”.
The efficiency cores (E-cores) play a more important role in new processors. Intel assures that Lunar Lake delivers “revolutionary energy efficiency” on x86 architecture with up to 40% lower SoC energy consumption. According to the manufacturer’s graphs, the cluster of the new Skymont cores achieve the same performance as the previous generation Crestmont with a third of the power consumption. Putting in perspective, with the same energy consumption, the new “low consumption island” where the cores achieves 2.9 times higher performance.
To put it in easier to understand terms, Intel exemplifies that on laptops with Lunar Lake, Teams will consume 35% less energy thanks to the optimizations of the new ones. E-cores Skymont. Intel calls Skymont its “more efficient architecture in performance”and even dares to compare it with its competition, ensuring up to 30% lower energy consumption than the Ryzen 7 7840U, and up to 20% lower than the Snapdragon X Elite.
New GPU and lots of integrated AI
The Lion Cove and Skymont cores are just the beginning of what’s new in Lunar Lake processors. The new Lunar Lake Xe2 GPU promises 1.5 better performance than Meteor Lakehas eight new generation Xe cores, support for real-time ray-tracing, can run up to 67 TOPs, and integrates eight units of ray tracing bigger. Again, the focus is on offering a significant leap in graphics, with the promise of lower power consumption.
In a demo with Stable Difusion 1.5, Lunar Lake achieved 40% better AI performance compared to the Snapdragon X Elite.
As part of the graphics section, the Xe2 GPU also integrates new display, media and image engines. The main new features are support for eDisplayPort 1.5, DisplayPort 2.1, HDMI 2.1, an external 8K HDR display at 60 fps, up to three 4K HDR displays at 60 fps, encoding of the VVC format, and encoding and decoding of the AV1 format.
Finally, there is NPU 4.0. The neural processing unit of Lunar Lake processors is “built for the next generation of AI” with Six neural processing cores promise performance of up to 48 TOPs, a big step up from the previous generation NPU’s TOP 11. Despite the increase in performance, the new NPU promises up to 20% lower energy consumption.
NPU 4.0 promises to introduce AI into all aspects of use of the new laptops, with support for large language models (LLM), and will bring to life all the AI features that Microsoft introduced with Copilot+ for all laptops with the processors. Moon Lake.
Among the functions that Lunar Lake AI will enable on next-generation laptops are: Recall, a tool that works as a reminder of everything that has been done on the computer, as a personal stock history, to search and retrieve items seen on the screen; Cocreator, content generation from text instructions; Live Captions, live translator that will convert audio into subtitles with support for more than 40 languages.
The great advantage of Lunar Lake processors integrating an NPU for AI processing is that all these functions will be executed locally, laptops They will not need a connection to the cloud for these new features to work.
In total, adding the performance of the CPU, GPU and NPU, the new Lunar Lake processors reach execution of up to 120 TOPs, says Intel.
Qualcomm is betting everything on the Arm architecture, and so is Microsoft by integrating the Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus processors with its new Surfaces. On the other hand, Intel continues on the path of the x86 architecture, with what it calls the greatest advances to increase the efficiency and performance of this architecture.
Lunar Lake processors will be integrated into laptops that will arrive in the third quarter of the year. ensures that There will be more than 80 laptop models, from more than 20 manufacturerswhich will arrive in the coming months, and has the goal of shipping 40 million PCs with the AI of Lunar Lake processors by the end of 2024.
