Summary
- Lunar Lake's new chips aim to bust the myth that x86 can't be as efficient as Arm, focusing on E-cores for better performance.
- Integrated Xe2 graphics promise a 50% boost over Meteor Lake, a must-have for today's laptops without dedicated GPUs.
- Intel's Lunar Lake includes an advanced on-board NPU, paving the way for future AI tasks like Microsoft's Copilot+, despite some limitations.
Ahead of Computex, Intel held its Intel Tech Tour in Taipei, where it broke down the details of its upcoming mobile processors, codenamed Lunar Lake. The new chips are designed to achieve a wide variety of goals, from better efficiency to on-device AI. Indeed, the company specifically said that it wants to "bust the myth that x86 can't be as efficient as Arm".
At the event, Intel didn't shy away from talking about Arm chips. It didn't try to pretend that there wasn't an elephant in the room. Qualcomm's Snapdragon X series is here, and whether it's successful or not, the cat's out of the bag. People have seen what Arm can do in Apple's MacBooks, and if you want a great laptop, people are starting to think that's the way to go.
Lunar Lake has all-new cores
It's all about effiency
Lunar Lake includes four 'Lion Cove' P-cores and four 'Skymont' E-cores, and there's no Hyperthreading anymore. Hyperthreading isn't dead, as Intel said it'll still be used where it makes sense, but it doesn't make sense in laptop processors anymore.
The truth is that Hyperthreading was designed as a way to get two threads out of a single core, when CPUs only had one core. Ever since E-cores were introduced with 12th-gen 'Alder Lake', the technology has become less necessary. There's a trade-off that comes with Hyperthreading as well. A core that supports Hyperthreading consumes more power even when the feature is turned off.
And Lunar Lake is all about efficiency. While there are new P-cores, the focus is definitely on the Skymont E-cores.
At certain frequency, E-cores will actually get better performance than P-cores, and Lunar Lake is going to run as many tasks as it can on the E-cores. Once Thread Director determines that a task requires more power, it transfers it over to the P-cores.
Compared to Meteor Lake, which is now known as Core Ultra, tasks are going to run on the E-cores much more consistently. However, Windows still gets to decide which cores are used; Thread Director just makes a suggestion. Developers can override it as well.
Perhaps more importantly, the new Xe2 integrated graphics are promising a 50% performance boost over Meteor Lake. That's a big improvement, and frankly, Meteor Lake's Arc graphics are already pretty good.
The truth is, integrated graphics have to be good. This is a new age for laptops, because no one is asking for dedicated graphics on a MacBook Pro. And Intel can do all it wants to make its CPUs more efficient, but it won't do any good if Nvidia graphics suck all the power anyway.
The NPU makes it ready for Copilot+...eventually
Memory is integrated into the chip too
Just like every new laptop chip being announced these days, Lunar Lake comes with an on-board NPU. This one supports up to 48 TOPS, and since Intel isn't announcing any actual SKUs this week, it's unclear if that 48 TOPS (INT8) promise applies to the Lunar Lake family or just the top-end SKU.
Most importantly, it's enough to qualify for Copilot+, Microsoft's AI PC initiative for running on-device AI tasks like Recall, Cocreator, and more. The bad news is that Copilot+ isn't actually ready for x86 processors, so it likely won't be ready for launch.
Microsoft Copilot+: Everything you can do with your new AI PC
AI PCs are here, and there's a lot you can do with them
One other notable change to the chip is that it features on-board memory, something we've already seen from Apple Silicon. That does mean that for a large number of ultrabooks, upgradeable memory won't be an option, which is probably fine for the form factor, but it should be a lot faster. Basically, a shorter trip from the CPU to the memory and back means better performance.
New hardware is coming soon
While I did get to see previews of laptops coming from companies like Acer and Asus, they're not going to be for sale right away. Lunar Lake will begin shipping in Q3 and Q4, although from what I understand, it's going to be a limited launch, similar to how very few Meteor Lake SKUs were available in December, and the rest came months later.
There's a Lunar Lake Dev Kit that was shown off as well, not to be shown up by Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite dev box. That will also be one of the first devices that ships with the new platform.
Of course, Intel has to tell us the rest of the details first. Much like AMD's announcement, Intel's launch doesn't tell us much about what will actually be in the hands of consumers. We don't know what the SKUs will be. We were told Lunar Lake has eight cores, but we don't know if the company is talking about the top-end SKU, or if something like a Core Ultra 5 will have the same core count. The same goes for NPU performance, which is up to 48 TOPS.
It seems like we'll find out more at IFA, which is set to take place in early September and lines up nicely with Intel's launch schedule.