While Microsoft and Qualcomm are having a fun time announcing the latest Snapdragon X series-powered Copilot+ PCs, Intel ain’t gonna back off just yet because they just announced the upcoming Lunar Lake processors.
Marketed as the most power-efficient x86 chip ever, it doesn’t really say much until actual reviews come out later on but just for the grain of salt, they were said to be 1.4x more powerful than Snapdragon X Elite in AI-related tasks which is kind of the point they are trying to drive and tackle against the Qualcomm launch.
The internals are to stay fundamentally the same but with enhancements across the board – faster CPU and NPU cores, a new Xe2 iGPU design that offers 50% more performance over Meteor Lake processors, and a revamped Lower Power Island that makes “background tasks even more power efficient”. As for the layout, they have chosen a 3-tiles design over Meteor Lake’s 4-tiles which suggests the combination of SoC and GPU for Lunar Lake.
The underlying P-cores and E-cores come from the new Lion Cove/Skymont microarchitecture that reportedly delivers even better Instructions Per Cycle (IPC) numbers despite the lack of hyperthreading therefore it will be interesting to see how the decision affects everyday usage and gaming once the finished products lands in Q3 2024 as announced.
Another point to look out for is the NPU’s 45+TOPS performance which already exceeds Microsoft’s baseline 40TOPS requirement and that’s not counting the iGPU coming in to tackle parallelized workloads that would honestly run better through it but so far, we knew that the iGPU is capable of supporting the Intel Xe Matrix eXtensions (XMX) that specifically accelerates matrix math operations (which are most AI workloads at the low level) on the hardware level.
And as always, because there’s never a true battle between processors that were “freshly out of the oven” for the public, just bear in mind that the 20% and 30% better power consumption are against the “older” Ryzen 7 7840U and Snapdragon 8CX Gen3 so just take it as a base reference.
Source: Tom’s Hardware, Intel
