Qualcomm recently presented the new ARM Snapdragon Elite X SoCs with which, from mid-2024, it wants to try to attack the PC market, historically dominated by Intel and AMD. And although Intel’s number one, Pat Gelsinger, is skeptical about the success of the undertaking, the Santa Clara company seems to be moving on to countermeasures to stem a possible rise of ARM chips in the territory that has always been the fiefdom of the x86 platform. Intel Lunar Lake it seems to be the response to the increasingly lively interest in ARM processors, also expressed by NVidia and AMD.
Not only. When Intel releases the new Lunar Lake in 2025, the processors (which will be increasingly true SoC, System-on-a-Chip) aspire to rival the successors of the Apple M3 used in the MacBook Pro.
Intel Lunar Lake: the main features of future processors
The company led by Gelsinger seems to want to play the next game on the same pitch as ARM. The new ones Intel Lunar Lakeaccording to some slide escaped the US company’s meshes, they will focus heavily on low and maximum consumption energy efficiency.
With Lunar Lake, Intel is starting from scratch: the new processors will require a new socket e chipset different from their predecessors. Furthermore, they will be chips specifically designed for use in a wide range of portable devices, including convertibles and 2-in-1s. They will arrive on the market after the processors Meteor Lake e Arrow Lake.
Future Lunar Lakes would be developed in collaboration with Microsoft in order to ensure end users perfect hardware-software integration and obtain the maximum possible energy efficiency. So much so that some models will be characterized by a TDP of 30W, dropping down to just 8W.
Intel will introduce the form factor “MX”: These are essentially the current “U” series (low operating voltage) processors enriched with memory on-chip to minimize PCB size. The chiplet design, to which Intel has also “converted”, will allow Lunar Lake to be equipped with everything necessary.
Chiplet architecture
As regards theCPU architectureLunar Lake will confirm the hybrid design we already know, combining P cores and E cores Lion Cove e Skymont for high performance and energy efficiency (for less demanding tasks). The processors will be marketed in at least four variants, depending on the amount of memory and graphics cores:
- Core 7 32GB: 4P+4E+8X graphics corese2-LPG
- Core 7 16GB: 4P+4E+8X graphics corese2-LPG
- Core 5 32GB: 4P+4E+7X graphics corese2-LPG
- Core 5 16GB: 4P+4E+7X graphics corese2-LPG
As for the connectivitysupport for the most up-to-date versions of the WiFi and Thunderbolt standards, as well as USB4, HDMI 2.1 and Display Port 1.4 is a given.
In terms of autonomy battery life, we are talking about 11 hours for intermediate-range PC models. The performance per wattat least on paper, could be the best ever made by Intel in its history.
Memory
Lunar Lake chips will be able to use 16 or 32 GB of RAM with a 160-bit dual-channel interface. The working frequency of the memory will be high, LP5X-8533, and the RAM modules will include a very fast 8 MB SRAM cache. A neural processing unit will debut NPU 4.0an increasingly relevant component taking into account the increasingly frequent use of artificial intelligence applications.
Integrated Graphicse2-LPG
With the launch of Lunar Lake processors, Intel will debut its X integrated graphics moduleseNew generation 2-LPG, evolution of the current one Arc. The new GPUwhich will also be integrated on dedicated video cards, will be able to count on 64 vector engines and will support the ray tracing in real time. They will allow the video decoding in VVC/H.266 hardware and will have Display Port 1.4 and HDMI 2.1 outputs.
The opening image is from Intel.
