Intel processors: Lunar Lake in Q3, Arrow Lake in Q4
Intel will release two processor families in 2024. Lunar Lake should take the wind out of ARM's sails.
A rendered Lunar Lake processor with two RAM devices on the carrier.
(Image: Intel)
Qualcomm is attacking Intel in its core business with the Snapdragon X Elite: Notebook processors. Intel counters with Lunar Lake –, a CPU family specially designed for slim notebooks. As part of an announcement, Intel has revealed new details and narrowed down the release dates.
Notebooks with Lunar Lake processors are to be released in the third quarter of 2024, i.e. by September. Arrow Lake CPUs will follow in the fourth quarter, although it is unclear for which platforms first. Unlike Lunar Lake, Arrow Lake is also coming back for desktop PCs.
(Image: Intel)
4 + 4 CPU cores
Lunar Lake combines four performance cores (Lion Cave) with four efficiency cores (Skymont) – possibly low-power efficiency cores will be added, which Intel does not count as part of the main CPU. Intel is significantly boosting the integrated AI unit: As with Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite, it should be able to perform at least 45 trillion operations per second (45 TOPS) in the common INT8 data format and thus be able to run Microsoft's Copilot locally.
The GPU also integrates the Xe Matrix Extensions (XMX), which also understand the execution of AI algorithms – analogous to Nvidia's Tensor cores in the GeForce RTX graphics cards and AMD's AI Accelerators in the Radeon RX 7000. The GPU performs an additional 60 TOPS when high throughput is required and energy efficiency takes a back seat. Lunar Lake thus achieves more than 100 TOPS of total AI performance.
Conditionally low-power
The power limits in Intel's pre-series benchmarks are surprisingly high. The CPUs were allowed to permanently consume 17 and 30 watts of electrical power. As Lunar Lake is also intended for fanless devices, more economical variants should follow.
(Image: Intel)
However, the power limits should only tell half the story. Lunar Lake notebooks should be particularly economical under partial load or in idle mode. Intel speaks of an "Advanced Low-Power Island for significantly lower power".
As with Meteor Lake, there are likely to be some basic logic blocks in the main chiplet to put the GPU and the actual CPU to sleep and thus save power. In Meteor Lake, these included additional lower-power efficiency cores, a media and display engine and the NPU. The bottom line is that Intel wants to be more efficient than AMD Ryzen and Qualcomm's Snapdragon in team video conferencing, for example.
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