I don’t really want to phrase the situation like this but I feel like Intel finds being a “party-pooper” fun because they chose to reveal more information about its Lunar Lake processors meanwhile the party between Microsoft, Qualcomm, and partners is going along today.
Marketed as the most power-efficient x86 chip ever, we sure will have our sweet time until the laptops actually launched and reviewers get to take a ride with it. Nonetheless, Intel asserts these processors are 1.4 times more powerful than the Snapdragon X Elite in AI-related tasks, highlighting their intent to compete directly with Qualcomm.
The internals remain fundamentally similar but feature enhancements across the board, including faster CPU and NPU cores, a new Xe2 iGPU design offering 50% more performance over Meteor Lake processors, and an upgraded Lower Power Island for improved power efficiency in background tasks. The layout has shifted to a 3-tile design from Meteor Lake’s 4-tiles, suggesting a combination of SoC and GPU for Lunar Lake.
The new P-cores and E-cores are based on the Lion Cove/Skymont microarchitecture, promising better Instructions Per Cycle (IPC) numbers despite lacking hyperthreading. It will be interesting to see how this decision impacts everyday use and gaming when the final products are released in Q3 2024, as announced.
Additionally, the NPU’s performance exceeds 45+ TOPS, surpassing Microsoft’s baseline 40 TOPS requirement, with the iGPU handling parallelized workloads more efficiently. The iGPU supports Intel Xe Matrix Extensions (XMX), which accelerate matrix math operations crucial for most AI workloads at the hardware level.
Finally, keep in mind that the 20% and 30% improved power consumption figures are compared to the “older” Ryzen 7 7840U and Snapdragon 8CX Gen3, so use these as a reference point.
Source: Tom’s Hardware, Intel
