Intel ‘Lunar Lake’ Will Challenge Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X AI PCs in 2024

Intel has teased the arrival of its next-gen CPU lineup, codenamed Lunar Lake, which is set to be launched as the Core Ultra (Series 2) in Q3 2024 and will power laptops marketed under Microsoft’s newly announced Copilot+ banner. While new competitor Qualcomm gets an exclusive lead on Copilot+ PCs with its new Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Plus CPUs, Microsoft did state that Intel and AMD-powered versions will join the party later in 2024. 

The Lunar Lake CPU series will succeed the company’s current-gen Meteor Lake offerings for thin-and-light laptops, and the company says more than 80 models from leading OEMs will go on sale in time for the 2024 US holiday season. It will be joined by Arrow Lake, a different design for desktop and high-end laptops. This generation will triple the AI processing performance of its predecessor and deliver performance improvements across its CPU and GPU components. Between its current and upcoming offerings, Intel expects to ship over 40 million PC processors with integrated AI capabilities this year.

However, some Copilot+ experiences, such as the Recall contextual history search feature which Microsoft highlighted during the Copilot+ unveiling, will only be supported at an unspecified later time when software updates are available. 

The Lunar Lake NPU will be capable of over 40 TOPS (trillion operations per second), a measure of AI performance. The platform will also benefit from Intel’s next-gen Xe GPU architecture, codenamed Battlemage, which will support an additional 60 TOPS of AI processing bandwidth and Intel’s XMX (Xe Matrix Extensions) instruction set.

On the CPU front, new performance cores (codenamed Lion Cove) and efficiency cores (codenamed Skymont), as well as a new ultra-low-power “island” are said to drive even better performance and battery life for laptops. The company even claims “never-before-seen” power efficiency, likely to take on Apple’s laptops running on its own Arm-based M-series SoCs.  Lunar Lake will continue to use Intel’s now-established Foveros 3D packaging technology.

One huge change is the use of on-package LPDDR5X memory, which means RAM will now be part of the CPU package rather than soldered onto a motherboard or on a removable module. Also like Apple’s current M-series SoCs, this should help increase performance and reduce power consumption. It will also allow for motherboard size reduction.

Specific performance benchmark numbers have not yet been disclosed, but Intel claims favourable results in terms of AI, graphics and core performance as well as power efficiency when compared to the just-announced Qualcomm Snapdragon X processors and AMD’s current-gen offerings, in specific workloads. All three companies are set to host keynotes at Computex in early June, where more information will undoubtedly be revealed.