Intel shared particulars about its upcoming Lunar Lake processor, which can energy laptops by the tip of 2024. Lunar Lake is a significant overhaul that comes proper after Intel’s Core Extremely (Meteor Lake), which the corporate referred to as its greatest architectural shift in 40 years.
Lunar Lake is a brand new system-on-chip design that guarantees 14% sooner CPU efficiency on the similar clock velocity, a 50% bump in graphics efficiency, and as much as 60% higher battery life than Meteor Lake.
Lunar Lake is constructed not on an Intel course of (as a result of Intel is engaged on its 1.8nm EUV 18A node), however on TSMC’s 3nm node – N3 for the compute tile, and N6 for the platform tile.
The primary huge change in comparison with the earlier Intel cellular chip is the RAM. It is now baked into the package deal itself – you may both select 16GB or 32GB of LPDDR5X RAM and it may’t be upgraded afterward.
The opposite huge modifications are the Effectivity cores and the transfer away from hyperthreading. Meteor Lake introduced low-power effectivity (LP-E) cores alongside the effectivity (E) and efficiency (P) cores to pursue higher battery life. However that seemingly did not work, so it is axing the configuration with Lunar Lake, as a substitute choosing a break up between 4 new “Lion Cove” P cores and 4 new “Skymont E cores”.
Dropping hyperthreading reportedly would not damage efficiency – Intel claims as much as 1.5 occasions higher efficiency at a comparable draw to Meteor Lake. Per Intel, the “Lion Cove” P cores carry a 50% performance-per-watt enchancment, and round 20% to 80% from the “Skymont” E cores. In actual fact, the brand new “Skymont” E cores provide round 2% instructions-per-clock enchancment over Raptor Lake’s P core design – you learn that proper – Intel’s Lunar Lake effectivity cores are sooner per clock than Raptor Lake’s efficiency cores.
This enchancment reportedly comes from the added cache, the brand new course of node, and the brand new architectural design.
Graphics-wise, Lunar Lake brings Xe2 graphics with as much as 60 TOPS (tera operations per second), which can basically make entry-level GPUs redundant. Intel claims a 1.5x enchancment over the Xe GPU in Meteor Lake.
Lastly, let’s deal with AI. Lunar Lake triples the NPU die, doubles the reminiscence bandwidth, and boosts the clock from 1.4GHz to 1.95GHz. That ends in a lift from the 11.5 TOPS of Meteor Lake to 48 TOPS in Lunar Lake.
Intel says the added energy draw is mitigated by the velocity benefit – simply 5.8 seconds for 20 iterations of Steady Diffusion vs 20.9 seconds on the earlier chip.
Intel goals for an end-of-2024 launch for Lunar Lake. It helps PCI-Specific 5, Thunderbolt 4 and USB4. HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort 2.1, Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, and Gigabit Ethernet.
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