Closing Remarks: Piecing Lunar Lake Together, Coming Q3 2024

Closing Remarks: Piecing Lunar Lake Together, Coming Q4 2024

So, what's Lunar Lake all about? We know that Lunar Lake isn't built using any of Intel's nodes, which may come as a massive surprise to some, but it does leverage TSMC's 3 nm N3B node, and on paper, it looks like a significant upgrade to Meteor Lake. Lunar Lake seems like a big mobile CPU architectural uplift from Intel when compared directly to Meteor Lake in the mobile SoC space, marking a big jump in task-specific processing capabilities. Now, they integrated Lion Cove P-cores with Skymont E-cores, addressing the intensive task together with the background activities to ensure maximum performance.

Also, the inclusion of NPU 4, which pumps 48 TOPS, makes Lunar Lake a strong competitor in the AI and machine learning field, with "world-class" AI performance, highlighting Intel's investment in AI for the AI-driven future. However, AMD's recent Zen 5 and Ryzen AI 300-based disclosure puts it ahead in TOPS at an 8-bit level. Unlike AMD, Intel has focused on giving a holistic figure for combined TOPS for Lunar Lake, although much of this is NPU and GPU. 

Intel's system efficiency has been beautifully demonstrated in the provided slides and in the Intel Tech Tour Taipei presentations. However, the proof is what the silicon is like in hand and how it performs in devices. Still, with the latest Xe2-LPG and up to 32 GB of on-package memory brought to the table using their Foveros packaging technology, it remains to be seen how essentially limiting upgradability in terms of memory capacity is seen across the wider industry.

Lunar Lake also brings power management improvements, including the enhanced Intel Thread Director and the quad array Power Management Controllers, which enables Lunar Lake to adjust dynamically to changing workload requirements. The latter is increasingly key for mobile due to battery life concerns and the need for long-lasting performance. Lunar Lake is on track for a launch planned in Q4 2024, and while Meteor Lake was inherently later to market than Intel would have liked, hopefully, Lunar Lake can stay on track.

The choices Intel has made for Lunar Lake make it seem more of an incremental jump instead of a full rethink of what we saw with Meteor Lake. Yes, on paper, Intel has made significant improvements by introducing new P-Cores, E-Cores, a new process node, power improvements, the new NPU 4, and new Xe2-LPG graphics. Still, Intel fails to deliver anything meaningful in the shape of performance figures; not even anything to compare what it can do with other chips currently on the market, nor chips expected to hit the market soon.

It seems as if Lunar Lake is more of a "look at what we can do" than the final and intended result of Intel's disaggregated mobile architecture. It remains to be seen how Lunar Lake will perform compared to Qualcomm and AMD's offerings, but it's clear Intel is the more ambitious of the three, and we look forward to seeing what Lunar Lake has to offer.

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