The company has also made changes to its core system, replacing last year's Low Power Efficiency (LP-E) cores with a new 4 by 4 system of "Lion Cove" P-cores and "Skymont" E-Cores. This change, along with a new thread director, allows for the creation of "containment zones" that keep most workloads on the Skymont E-cores, improving battery life and efficiency. Intel also claims that its Xe2 GPU offers 1.5x the graphics performance of Meteor Lake and that Lunar Lake triples the amount of NPU hardware on the die, offering up to 48 TOPS and an estimated 2x to 4x performance overall.
Key takeaways:
- Intel's next laptop chip, Lunar Lake, will feature a new system-on-chip design that triples the size and more than quadruples the performance of its AI accelerator, promising up to 14 percent faster CPU performance, 50 percent more graphics performance, and up to 60 percent better battery life than last year’s model.
- Lunar Lake will have 16 or 32GB of LPDDR5X memory baked into the package itself, reducing the power consumption of moving data through the system by approximately 40 percent.
- The new chip will feature up to four new “Lion Cove” P-cores and four new “Skymont” E-Cores, which are more compact and capable than the previous generation, leading to Intel axing Hyper-Threading.
- Intel's Lunar Lake laptops will arrive later this year, with 80 different designs across 20 hardware partners at launch, all expected to be available ahead of the holidays.