Tuesday, January 17th 2023
Intel "Lunar Lake" a Ground-Up Architecture Designed to Dominate the 15W Segment
Intel faces its stiffest long-term challenge not from AMD in the client desktop and server segments, but from the likes of Apple and Qualcomm in the ultraportable notebook SoC market. The company is looking to meet the challenge head-on with not just its current Hybrid architecture-based "Rocket Lake-U" processors, but the upcoming "Meteor Lake" and "Arrow Lake" architectures, which disaggregate the processor into chiplets build on various foundry nodes, including ones that are external to Intel. The move here is to keep Intel ahead of the curve with Moore's Law buckling. The real ace up Intel's sleeves is "Lunar Lake."
Slated for "beyond 2024" (which could mean 2025 or later), "Lunar Lake" is reportedly a fresh ground-up design for not just the SoC, but also the CPU microarchitecture, with a design focus on performance/Watt, and a focus on mobile devices. This, according to a statement to Dr Ian Cutress. Intel has already brought Hybrid CPU cores to the PC, and with Arm partners loading their SoCs with three or more kinds of CPU cores; Intel could possibly give "Lunar Lake" even more [kinds of] Hybrid processing capabilities. Another hint on the direction in which Intel is heading comes from unlikely quarters—"Sapphire Rapids." Intel's latest enterprise processors attempt to overcome the CPU core-count deficit to AMD, by incorporating various on-die accelerators—these are fixed-function hardware that accelerate specific kinds of enterprise workloads. Intel could give us another lick about "Lunar Lake" in its January 26 Q4-2022 Financial Disclosures Day.
Sources:
Dr Ian Cutress (Twitter), VideoCardz
Slated for "beyond 2024" (which could mean 2025 or later), "Lunar Lake" is reportedly a fresh ground-up design for not just the SoC, but also the CPU microarchitecture, with a design focus on performance/Watt, and a focus on mobile devices. This, according to a statement to Dr Ian Cutress. Intel has already brought Hybrid CPU cores to the PC, and with Arm partners loading their SoCs with three or more kinds of CPU cores; Intel could possibly give "Lunar Lake" even more [kinds of] Hybrid processing capabilities. Another hint on the direction in which Intel is heading comes from unlikely quarters—"Sapphire Rapids." Intel's latest enterprise processors attempt to overcome the CPU core-count deficit to AMD, by incorporating various on-die accelerators—these are fixed-function hardware that accelerate specific kinds of enterprise workloads. Intel could give us another lick about "Lunar Lake" in its January 26 Q4-2022 Financial Disclosures Day.
30 Comments on Intel "Lunar Lake" a Ground-Up Architecture Designed to Dominate the 15W Segment
In any case, I feel that x86 processors are not really suited for the ultra low power segment. ARM based SOC seems like a better fit for such lower power requirements and for battery life. So I am looking forward to see what Qualcomm can bring to the table since my experience with Apple's M1 Macbook Air was really good.
But it happens, from time to time you have to let go of one thing and start working on the next.
This mix tile\lithography is great but each different tile add complexity and so possible fail point of many sorts.
Say what you want about the OS and software experience (I'm not an apple guy for sure), but the silicon is still undefeated when it comes to power efficiency. Which is what this is about.
I believe the purpose of the "Royal Core" as it was once called was to clean up the waste from Skylake's continued buildup and to create a leaner design that delivers modern IPC.
As for piling three different cores, it's possible, if only for the possibility of adding more cores for standby time; Intel officially stated at Hot Chips 30 (2018) that the Cove-mont hybrid is Big-bigger, not Big-LITTLE. P-E combination is the same as the Prime-big combination in ARM for Android, and the Intel hybrid lacks a standby time LITTLE core.
Class-action lawsuits should follow for misleading investor and public information.
At least video editors using MacOS are disappointed with the M1 Ultra's lack of performance in Da Vinci Resolve and Photoshop (and even Final Cut Pro developed by the Apple themselves.) Threadripper was also popular among them, but unfortunately AMD has abandoned it for Socket sTRX4; the 13900K was reasonably popular because it could deliver the same level of performance as the M1 Ultra even with 60W PL2, and the same level of performance per watt as the 3970X.
To be fair though even now they(Intel) do ok, my I5 work laptop gets used at least 7 hrs for work without a power lead.
or how Intel already had 10nm CPUs but people spammed "still only 14nm+++++++" because consumer desktop series was still at 14nm? Will give you a hint, look at 11th gen mobile segment, Intel already had 10nm then on some models
these comments of "place random number, add nm and spam alot of + symbols" are just boring
Continuously slipping release schedules.
And promises of Angstrom grade parts years before release.
But we're here again with the lofty PR anoucment without any real facts and absolutely no parts to show.
You know what's actually the most power efficient silicon ? Probably something like this : www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-epyc-9654, you can be sure there are plenty of test cases where 96 cores at 360W are going to annihilate Apple silicon at power efficiency.
Also, "20A" is TSMC N3, while "18A" is in fact TSMC N2.
Years will pass before you see that in your Core i9...
I think Arrow Lake will be a nice improvement on efficiency, but yeah Lunar Lake is the big one.
By that time Zen 6 will be out too and Intel will face stiff competition. Zen 4 offers far more performance per Watt below 125W and in laptop Dragon range HX will slaughter Raptor Lake HX in the 45-65W segment.
In such a situation, the "nm" metric, which assumes a isotropic shrinkage, has no physical meaning. It has been customary to double the transistor density in one generation, and to reduce the "X" in "X nm" to 1/√2. However, Intel rounded 2.4x to the nearest 2x, while TSMC rounded 1.7x to the nearest 2x. That gave roughly equal steps between Intel's two generations and TSMC's three generations.
Intel is aware that small steps are more reliable than one large stride in the latest node, and they said at last year's conference that it will be a series of small steps in the future.Intel has only a small quantity of EUV machines in 2023 because of the delay in ordering EUV machines from ASML, but there are quite a few for delivery in 2024.
As a result, mass production for Intel4 will take place at only one location, Fab34, while the 20A Fab is being built at four locations in Arizona and Ohio, and according to the general civil schedule, will be completed and receive EUV machines in 2024.