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Intel recently revealed that its upcoming Lunar Lake chips are due to launch this fall for its Copilot+ AI PCs, but the company didn’t share any technical details until Computex. First, an updated Neural Processing Unit (NPU) will deliver up to 48 TOPs (Tera Operations per Second) of AI performance. By comparison, Intel’s previous Meteor Lake chips featured a 10 TOPS NPU, while AMD announced its Ryzen AI 300 chips yesterday with a 50 TOPS NPU. As you can see, the AI race is on.
Intel will once again be forced to play catch-up in the AI PC arena. AMD’s Ryzen AI 300 chips will launch in July alongside Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus. It’s unclear exactly when Lunar Lake systems will launch this fall. Still, for Intel loyalists, Lunar Lake looks to be a big upgrade. It will also feature the new Xe2 GPU, which offers 80% faster gaming performance than the previous generation, and an AI accelerator with an additional 67 TOPS of performance. (We’ll have to wait to see how it compares to AMD’s new Radeon graphics.)
Surprisingly, the Lunar Lake chips will also have onboard memory, just like Apple Silicon. The chips will ship with 16GB or 32GB of RAM, but like Apple, you can’t add more later. By moving the memory so close to the processor cores, Intel has been able to reduce latency and system power usage by 40%. However, if you actually need more RAM, you’re out of luck; you’ll have to wait for Intel’s next family of chips, codenamed Arrow Lake.
Additionally, Lunar Lake offers eight cores with improved performance and efficiency cores (P-cores and E-cores). Intel also says the chips feature “advanced low-power islands” for efficiently handling background tasks. This, along with other optimizations, the company claims improves battery life by 60 percent over Meteor Lake.
Clearly, both Intel and AMD are going to do everything in their power to compete with Qualcomm’s Copilot+ hardware, as these mobile chips are inherently more power efficient, with Copilot+ Surface devices said to offer 20+ hours of battery life (although we haven’t tested this yet).
Connectivity-wise, Lunar Lake offers the latest standards you’d expect, including Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, PCIe Gen5, and Thunderbolt 4. (It’s odd that Intel hasn’t committed to Thunderbolt 5 yet, even though it plans to release it later this year.)
Given how far away Lunar Lake really is, Intel hasn’t offered any further information on specific chip models or detailed specifications, but judging by the company’s benchmarks released in a media briefing ahead of Computex, it should be significantly faster than Meteor Lake when running Stable Diffusion, completing 20 iterations in 5.8 seconds versus 20.9 seconds. It will consume a few watts more power, but the increased speed should make up for that.