Intel has just thrown down the gauntlet in the AI PC war with their announcement of the upcoming Lunar Lake CPUs, set to launch in Q3 2024. These new chips are said to deliver an impressive 1.4x more AI performance than Qualcomm’s recently unveiled Snapdragon X Elite chips, which Microsoft showcased earlier today.
But that’s not all – Intel is also touting incredible gains in battery life and power efficiency with Lunar Lake. According to the company, these new CPUs will have the lowest power consumption ever seen in an x86 processor, consuming 20% less power than Qualcomm’s chips and a shocking 30% less than AMD’s Ryzen 7 7840U.
Intel has been hard at work updating all of Lunar Lake’s compute elements, including faster CPU and Neural Processing Unit (NPU) cores, a revamped Low Power Island (LPI), and a new integrated GPU based on the Xe2 architecture. Despite the focus on AI-specific features, Intel claims that Lunar Lake will be “FASTER” than both the Ryzen 7 8840U and Snapdragon X Elite, although they have not provided any concrete benchmarks or statistics to back up this claim.
Lunar Lake production wafers are already running through Intel’s fabs as the company races to meet a Q3 launch deadline to ensure OEMs have laptops ready for the holiday retail season. These new CPUs build on the experience of Intel’s Meteor Lake chip, which was the first to use a tiled/chiplet architecture and includes an integrated NPU to accelerate AI workloads.
While Intel’s claims about Lunar Lake’s power efficiency represent a radical shift for x86 CPUs, with up to 30% lower active power consumption than competitors, it’s important to note that these are based on Intel’s own estimates. Even though production wafers are already running, the lack of final performance numbers makes us wonder what the final benchmarks might look like.
In addition to the Lunar Lake announcement, Intel also has its next-generation Arrow Lake processors for AI-powered desktop PCs on the roadmap for Q4 2024. More updates on these chips are expected next week during an Intel Tech Tour event for the press, just ahead of Computex 2024, where we will bring you all the news as it happens on the ground in Taiwan.
With the new push for AI in almost everything computing, Intel’s Lunar Lake CPUs will be a major player, promising significant improvements in AI performance and power efficiency. While this all sounds exciting, until we see concrete benchmarks and do some hands-on testing, we are cautiously optimistic that these chips can deliver on Intel’s promise. One thing is for sure: the competition between Intel, Qualcomm, and AMD will only intensify as we get closer to the launch of these next-generation processors later this year.
