Intel has revealed details regarding its latest Lunar Lake processor, which is set to power laptops by the end of the year.
Lunar Lake is an overhaul that arrives straight after Intel’s Core Ultra (Meteor Lake). The company has referred to this as its biggest architectural shift in 40 years.
Lunar Lake will be an on-system chip that has a promised 14 per cent faster CPU performance at the same clock speed as Meteor Lake, as well as a 50 per cent boost in graphics performance, and up to 60 per cent better battery life.
Lunar Lake hasn’t been built using an Intel process, instead, it was built on TSMC’s 3nm node.
One of the biggest changes comes with the RAM, as it’s now packed into the package itself. The purchaser can choose 16GB or 32GB LPDDR5X RAM. It cannot be upgraded later on.
Other big changes include the efficiency cores and a move away from hyperthreading. With Meteor Lake, there were low-power efficiency (LP-E) cores along with efficiency (E) cores and performance (P) cores for a better battery life.
The Lunar Lake instead goes for a split between four new ‘Lion Cove’ P cores, as well as four new ‘Skymont’ E cores.
Reportedly, by getting rid of hyperthreading, the performance isn’t affected. Intel has claimed that the Lunar Lake has up to 1.5x better performance when compared to the Meteor Lake.
According to Intel, the ‘Lion Cove’ cores provide a 50 per cent improvement per watt, and between 20 per cent and 8- per cent from the ‘Skymont’ cores.
‘Skymont’ also offer about 2 per cent improvement for instructions per clock over Intel’s Raptor Lake.
Reportedly, this improvement is possible due to the added cache, the new process node, and the new architectural design.
This new Lunar Lake processor also brings Xe2 graphics with up to 60 TOPS (tera operations per second). Intel claims this has a 1.5x improvement over the Xe GPU in Meteor Lake.
The Lunar Lake also doubles memory bandwidth, triples NPU die, and boosts the clock from 1.4GHz to 1.95GHz. It results in a boost from 11.5 TOPS (Meteor Lake) to 48 TOPS (Lunar Lake).
Lunar Lake is also expected to support PCI-Express 5, Thunderbolt 4 and USB4. HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort 2.1, Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, and Gigabit Ethernet.