Intel Unveils Lunar Lake Architecture for Laptops, Featuring Dramatically Improved GPU, More Powerful NPU, and Comprehensive RAM

Computex is, by far, the big candy store for PC lovers. The hardware news does not stop piling up, and if yesterday it was AMD that announced its next releases, now it is Intel that is advancing what will be its future laptop processors. Known as Lunar Lake, this architecture is a huge improvement over its current Meteor Lake-based processors, and particularly the low-end ones.

One of the most peculiar details of Lunar Lake is that it will not even be a chip manufactured internally by Intel, but rather its production has been outsourced to TSMC, which will use a mix of its N3B and N6 processes to shape some chipsets which combine CPU, GPU, NPU and memory. This will allow Intel to free up production capacity for other processors, all while continuing to build new factories to serve external customers using its own lithographs.

Intel has not yet provided a list of products as such, limiting itself to breaking down the characteristics of an architecture that will combine a symmetrical eight-core design (4P+4E) without hyperthreading, so the number of processing threads will also be eight. As pointed out AnandTechthe higher performance cores (P) are derived from the latest versions of Lion Cove, so they should provide good performance, while the high efficiency cores (E) are completely new Skymont.

Also interesting is the neural processing unit, which is called NPU 4. With a performance of 48 TOPS, it is suitable for use in computers with Copilot+ and is quite close to the figures managed by AMD. The jump is enormous compared to the old NPU 3, multiplying the TOPS by four and doubling the bandwidth.

The integrated GPU, for its part, deserves a little more detail. Based on the Xe2 architecture, the graphics processing unit brings to the table a 50% improvement over the iGPUs integrated into Meteor Lake, thanks in part to the use of new It also has eight faster ray tracing processing units than before and is especially efficient at compressing and decompressing video, with native support for H.266 VVC.

One of the most notable aspects of Xe2 is that this architecture will serve to shape the next generation of desktop graphics cards, known by the codename Battlemage. Its performance is a mystery for now, but the benchmarks Intel for Lunar Lake computers point out that certain internal operations are performed much faster using the same number of processing units (for example: the call to execute a command is performed seven times faster with Xe2).

Finally, Lunar Lake will incorporate into the packaging of the chipset 32 GB of LPDDR5X RAM. In other words, the RAM will not be expandable. There will be different versions of the same team and that is where the customization possibilities end.

According to Intel, the first devices with Lunar Lake will go on sale in the third quarter of this year. The list will include the MSI Claw 8 AI+ console, which will incorporate some additional improvements over the current model.