Intel launches Lunar Lake laptop CPUs

Intel this week revealed its Lunar Lake CPU architecture for laptops, destined to reach a number of PC makers later this year. The Lunar Lake design uses a new system-on-chip format, with a revamped focus on AI — that means tripling the size of the NPU, doubling its bandwidth, and increasing its clock speed to 1.95GHz. That’s said to boost NPU performance anywhere from two to four times over Meteor Lake architecture.

For Lunar Lake chips as a whole, Intel is promising up to 60% better battery life, and up to 14% faster CPU performance versus identical Meteor Lake clock speeds. Part of this stems from radically re-organized cores, ditching LP-E (low-power efficiency) cores entirely in favor of more flexible E (efficiency) cores. Using a new thread director, Windows PCs should be able to keep some tasks entirely contained within the new E cores — Meteor Lake tried to do something similar, but in reality tasks would often trigger the E, LP-E, and P (performance) cores, consuming unnecessary energy.

Intel says it has even been able to ditch hyper-threading circuitry, but a potentially controversial design change is the elimination of expandable RAM. Lunar Lake chips are equipped with either 16 or 32GB of integrated LPDDR5X memory, and that’s it. This reduces power demands, but if you want a laptop with expandable (or replaceable) RAM, you’ll have to wait for Arrow Lake CPUs, also due later in 2024.

Other Lunar Lake upgrades and a release date

New CPUs will arrive before the end of the year

Though you’ll still want something with a decided AMD or Nvidia GPU for most 3D games, Lunar Lake does include Intel’s new Xe2 GPU, offering up to 1.5 times the graphics performance of Meteor Lake. It can also scale wattage on its own, eliminating the need for separate GPU tiers based on the overall performance of a laptop.

Some other upgrades include baked-in Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 support, and a promise of at least two Thunderbolt 4/USB-C ports on every compatible laptop. Intel is also putting a “Partner Security Engine” on Lunar Lake chips, which it describes to The Verge as “effectively Microsoft Pluton,” referring to Microsoft’s chip-to-cloud security processor.

While there’s no formal launch date for Lunar Lake, Intel says that the first big wave of equipped laptops should ship before the 2024 holiday season, coming from 20 hardware partners and in 80 different designs. Conspicuously absent from the partner list will be Microsoft, which recently went with Qualcomm chips for its latest Surface Pro and Laptop devices.