Intel has announced details of the upcoming mobile CPU generation, codenamed Lunar Lake. To launch under the same Core Ultra umbrella as the previous Meteor Lake chip, Intel promises some big tweaks to improve graphics, efficiency, and of course AI.

Before we talk about AI, it's really inevitable right now, but let's get down to the basics of Lunar Lake.

This is a low-power mobile system-on-chip, one that will mostly find its way to thin, light laptops. That should happen around Q3 this year — Intel says it's on track to get the chips out the door on time.

Lunar Lake is a hybrid design with both P-core and E-core, with 4 cores each and 8 cores in total. And this CPU component can see the biggest shake across generations. 

The new P-core is built with Lion Cove architecture, and Intel's Chief Technical Marketing officer robert Hallock says it has a higher IPC and a wider range, although it has lower frequencies than Meteor Lake's Redwood Cove core. They share up to 12MB of L3 cache with hyperthreading disabled. That's one of the big changes in Lunar Lake.1 The E-core seems to be enough to eliminate the need to multiply the available threads in the P-core by 2. The new E-core is built on the Skymont architecture.

These are more efficient than the previous cores, and importantly, they are all placed in 1 die on the chip, all in a compute tile. Another tile for low power is no longer, but these cores are still classified as living within the "low power island" complex, i.e. they can still function without ramping up the entire P-core computational complex.

"Not only have we moved from 2 cores to 4 in the context of a low-power island, we are also significantly ahead of [Meteor Lake] because these cores are much faster than the previous generation," Hallock said.

Intel is splitting up its latest CPUs in a very different way than the previous generation.

Lunar Lake consists of a base style, on which a platform controller tile and a computing tile are placed. There is also a small filler tile that fills the gap and ensures stability. It's less tile than Meteor Lake — Intel has combined different components to make it a smaller physical chipset.

Yeah, TSMC, the world's largest chip maker, currently makes most of Intel's latest processors. Although Intel is keen to point out that it is still assembled and packaged in its own facilities.

Thread Director is the key to making these cores work effectively, and Intel is working with Microsoft to include a new "OS containment zone" that will help get maximum efficiency from the latest chips. Lunar Lake's default process is a mobile chip, so you pass the task to the E-core to save power, see if it works, and so this is part of the way Intel can claim up to 40% power savings overall on Lunar Lake and Meteor Lake. How this will affect day-to-day battery life is anyone's guess, but Intel still has to dot the i and surely cross the t on those numbers

"We don't know yet," Harlock says. He adds that he expects Lunar Lake to be "very competitive in battery life."

One of the new additions to the compute tile is the memory-side cache.1 This is a very simple concept: Besides the CPU, NPU, display and media components sit 8MB cache is more expensive from the chip itself. However, the GPU does not directly access this extra cache. When it comes to memory, Lunar Lake comes with either 16GB or 32GB of LPDDR5X memory directly in the SoC package. 1. Another way to save power and delay, according to Intel. This approach effectively banishes even laptops with only 8GB of memory into the annals of history.

However, the GPU components within Lunar Lake are particularly interesting to PC gamers for 2 reasons.

First of all, with up to 8 Gen 2 Xe cores, we can claim a 1.5x performance boost on Meteor Lake. This is despite having the same number of Xe cores in the top configuration.

This brings us to the second reason: it can be argued that the same silicon improvements, thanks to the new and improved GPU architecture, Xe2, Battlemage, which goes by a different name on the desktop. 

Xe2 has the same architecture for both. There is no Xe-LPG or Xe-LP arch on the desktop graphics card, and there is another slight variation.

Lunar Lake gives us the first glimpse of what performance gains we can expect between Battlemage and Alchemist — in a much smaller, low-power configuration,

"a big leap in graphics," according to Intel's Arik Gihon.

However, Intel does not provide specific gaming benchmarks to meet the detail orientation among us. However, it states that the drivers will remain unified on desktop and mobile GPUs.

Xe2 includes a few notable updates to make thin and light games a bit more appealing: New optimizations for efficiency, Utilization I don't expect thin and light ones to make particularly good use of ray tracing in games - it's a bit like 8 power-limited Xe cores. Ask for more - on a large scale in the Battlemage graphics card, these should help.

However, AI is the name of a game that uses Lunar Lake. To that end, Intel includes a new Npu, a neural processing unit, that speeds up AI workloads, such as using LLM or any smaller AI tasks you might use. The new NPU includes 6 neural computing engines, which can increase the bandwidth by 2x. It culminates at the top of about 48.

That's an important number. It's just over the top 45 asked Microsoft for co-pilot + PC. In that memo, Intel's michelle Johnston Holthaus, vice president and GM of the company's client division, says it's still official at Microsoft re. It's a Copilot+ Pc with Intel, but we expect it to be available around Q3/Q4. For now, Qualcomm's latest ARM-based laptop chip will be the only option for Copilot+. Speaking of which, Gihon says he expects Lunar Lake to be "competitive" with Qualcomm's chips. "It's a way to build a chip, not an X86 vs. Arm," Hallock said. Finally, there are a few other key features worth mentioning: Wi-Fi7 and Bluetooth, AV1/VVC-enabled media engine, eDP1.5 and DP2.1, up to 3 external disks

Lunar Lake has been shaped to significantly improve Meteor Lake from the numbers presented so far, but that's what we have to keep going. This is all you have to do. And Holthaus said that Intel "wins by performance, wins by graphics, wins by AI.""I wonder how hyperthreading will react to the removed almost entirely TSMC-made chip. 

How it goes down depends on how Lunar Lake stacks up against the competition. On that note, Intel is keeping pretty quiet for now.