This is Lunar Lake — Intel’s utterly overhauled AI laptop chip that ditches memory sticks /

 

Last year, Intel boasted that its Meteor Lake processors, dubbed Core Ultra, represented the company’s biggest architectural shift in 40 years. But Intel didn’t settle down after that: today it’s revealing how Lunar Lake, its next laptop chip coming this fall, will overhaul the formula yet again.

Facing the existential threat of Arm and the opportunity of AI PCs, Intel has apparently ditched its famous tick-tock cadence for a whole new system-on-chip design, one that not only triples the size and more than quadruples the performance of its AI accelerator, but promises up to 14 percent faster CPU performance at the same clockspeed, 50 percent more graphics performance, and up to 60 percent better battery life than last year’s model.

It’s x86 power like you’ve never seen it before,” claims Intel technical marketer Rob Hallock, who says Intel tweaked every part of the chip to make it happen. He says it’ll “definitely” beat Qualcomm, too.

The biggest change? If you buy a Lunar Lake laptop, it won’t have separate memory sticks or chips! Lunar Lake now bakes 16 or 32GB of LPDDR5X memory into the package itself, with no ability to connect more RAM. It’s a change that reduces the power consumption of moving data through the system by approximately 40 percent, according to Intel. For those who need more memory, Hallock says a separate Arrow Lake architecture is coming to laptops later this year.

After hours of poring through slide decks and presentations, plus a quick chat with Hallock, here’s everything else I just learned.

Last year’s Meteor Lake contained a wild new “3D performance hybrid architecture” with loads of Performance (P), Efficiency (E), and even a pair of brand-new Low Power Efficiency (LP-E) cores on a separate tile dubbed the “low power island.”

That island was built like a smartphone, a first for Intel, with its own Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, display controllers, memory, and those low-power CPU cores. The idea: you could theoretically save battery life by never heating up other tiles and bigger cores unless you’re doing bigger tasks.