Intel's next-generation Lunar Lake CPU for notebook PCs will significantly enhance AI with over 100 TOPS of AI processing power. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said so at the recent Vision 2024.

In total, this represents about three times the capacity that Intel's existing Meteor Lake can deliver in raw AI processing. More importantly, 45 of these TOPS (trillion operations per second) come from Lunar Lake's upgraded NPU (Neural Processing Unit).

The rest comes from the CPU and GPU components. Intel has not disclosed the breakdown, but the majority is from Lunar Lake GPUs. General-purpose CPU cores are not suitable for generating large numbers of AI TOPS.

This is because Microsoft has decided that the minimum definition of an "AI PC" is 45 TOPS from dedicated NPUs; TOPS provided by CPUs and GPUs do not count in Microsoft's calculations.

The NPU in Intel's current Meteor Lake chips can only achieve 11 TOPS. For reference, the same is true for AMD's laptop chips.

The NPU in AMD's latest laptop chip, Hawk Point, outperforms Meteor Lake by 16 TOPS. However, it is still miles short of the definition required by Microsoft.

Interestingly, Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X Elite Arm SoC for Windows laptops has an NPU of 45 TOPS. So when the first systems go on sale in June, they will quickly qualify as AI PCs.

Indeed, unless AMD launches a new Strix Point APU by then, a laptop with Qualcomm's new chip could be the first PC you can buy that qualifies as an official Microsoft AI PC.

Incidentally, we do not know exactly why 45 TOPS is an important number for an AI revelation in a PC, according to Microsoft. However, it is certain that Microsoft set this goal in consultation with Intel and others.

In other words, it is probably no coincidence that the NPU TOPS for Lunar Lake and Snapdragon X Elite are perfectly consistent with Microsoft's definition.

As for when the Lunar Lake chips will appear, Intel has inked them as a 2024 product. However, it is very likely that they will not appear until the end of the year.

In the meantime, Intel's desktop CPUs are arguably in more dire need of an overhaul; Intel only last time successfully refreshed its existing Raptor Lake CPUs, and as a result, Allder Lake from 2021 It was only a mild refresh.

Arrow Lake is supposed to accomplish that job. This is another 2024 product, but there hasn't been much news about Arrow Lake recently. In other words, this is another Intel CPU, and we probably won't see much of it before the end of the year.