Intel Lunar Lake Technical Deep Dive

[W1zzard]

Intel today unveiled its ambitious Lunar Lake microarchitecture, which takes the fight to the likes of the Apple M3, the Snapdragon X Elite, and more, bringing high end AI PC experiences within an ultraportable footprint, with smartphone-like battery life and availability. We have all the technical details.

Show full review

 

[Chaitanya]

Looks like both Intel and AMD have gone nuclear on user replaceble DRAM modules. Not a good thing in long run.

 

[usiname]

Intel is kidding right? 14% IPC over Meteor Lake, the same Meteor Lake that has 10% lower IPC than Raptor Lake? So they removed the HT to "improve" their core for this? They lowered the clocks with 10% for this?

 

[JWNoctis]

Looks like both Intel and AMD have gone nuclear on user replaceble DRAM modules. Not a good thing in long run.

Arguably been the case for a while for ultrathins. I'm under the impression that it'd be lucky to get a user replaceable SSD in that segment.

Desktop processors are a different matter, though I do expect impressions to change, if integrated DRAM show clear & present performance advantages compared to traditional parts of the same architecture. There's bound to be a transitional period, if it ever goes there.

 

[Chaitanya]

Arguably been the case for a while for ultrathins. I'm under the impression that it'd be lucky to get a user replaceable SSD in that segment.

Desktop processors are a different matter, though I do expect impressions to change, if integrated DRAM show clear & present performance advantages compared to traditional parts of the same architecture. There's bound to be a transitional period, if it ever goes there.

AMD isnt offering different SKUs for different groups of notebooks, its all single CPU which can go into ultrathin to full fat desktop replacements so for them killing support for user replaceble memory is misstep.

 

[Bwaze]

Intel is kidding right? 14% IPC over Meteor Lake, the same Meteor Lake that has 10% lower IPC than Raptor Lake? So they removed the HT to "improve" their core for this? They lowered the clocks with 10% for this?

"Skymont is able to match the IPC of Raptor Cove at a fraction of its transistor count and hence a fraction of its power. Intel now has the freedom to flood its processors with Skymont clusters, and a handful Lion Cove P-cores, to create a formidable hybrid processor that can square off against high core-count AMD processors that only have high-performance cores, or their compacted versions. "

It's the low transistor count and power efficiency that's being applauded, so it's clear those cores won't be doing the heavy lifting in 6 GHz+ desktop monstrosities.

"Intel Core Ultra 200V isn't a direct successor to the entire Core Ultra 100 Meteor Lake family, but rather a new class of processors meant for thin-and-light notebooks—the same class that is powered by the Apple M3 or the Qualcomm Snapdragon Elite X."

 

[usiname]

"Skymont is able to match the IPC of Raptor Cove at a fraction of its transistor count and hence a fraction of its power. Intel now has the freedom to flood its processors with Skymont clusters, and a handful Lion Cove P-cores, to create a formidable hybrid processor that can square off against high core-count AMD processors that only have high-performance cores, or their compacted versions. "

It's the low transistor count and power efficiency that's being applauded, so it's clear those cores won't be doing the heavy lifting in 6 GHz+ desktop monstrosities.

"Intel Core Ultra 200V isn't a direct successor to the entire Core Ultra 100 Meteor Lake family, but rather a new class of processors meant for thin-and-light notebooks—the same class that is powered by the Apple M3 or the Qualcomm Snapdragon Elite X."

I speak for the P core, Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake will use the same P core

 

[Sunny and 75]

Interesting article!

 

[SN2716057]

I eagerly await the TPU tests.

 

[Bwaze]

It would be interesting if PC could make a breakthrough into tablet territory, but I think the people are now less impressed by PC applications as they were years ago, except for the specific uses, of course.

 

[Blueberries]

The Skymont performance claims are very interesting, I'm excited to see independent testing of these processors.

 

[R0H1T]

Unless they double or quadruple the caches & make the clocks much higher no way Skymont comes close to RPL. Those IPC claims sound more than just dubious!

 

[Garrus]

So they want to charge $500 like Apple for 16GB of ram? They might fail because of it.

Microsoft already ruined their Surface lineup by allowing 256GB of storage. Hopefully Intel Lunar Lake will stick to 16GB/500GB as the minimum.

 

[R0H1T]

I'd argue 1TB should be the bare minimum on any premium notebook these days! They're what $50 or so when on sale?

 

[londiste]

In addition to them straight up saying that this is very clearly going after Apple M and Qualcomm. AMD will follow suit.

Ditching HT has been known for a while but still interesting. Especially aiming for thin&lite it has power and transistorcount/area benefits while performance implications might not be that significant. I have to wonder though how big of a role did all the security vulnerabilities play in the decision to ditch it.
INT/FP split in execution is interesting - Intel seems to take a page straight out of Zen playbook with that. Probably has notable benefits in simpler scheduling and register management.
Other than that, widening of everything - and things that did not get wider probably only didn't because of HT ditch as they are less of a bottleneck after that.

E-cores might be impressive though. Decent increase in INT, quite sizable increase in FP (which was its weak point so gains are easy but still).
The comparison to Raptor Cove is rather interesting - although it is not that hard to see where/how the marketing numbers are reached. Still, being that close is impressive.

Xe2 does not seem to be something to be scoffed at either.

 

[ncrs]

Both tiles are made by TSMC and nothing by Intel Foundry apart from packaging with Foveros? Looks like it's going to be expensive.

 

[wolf]

The Q4 battle for high end PC CPU's will be awesome, Intel will launch their latest and I suspect AMD will time Ryzen 9000 X3D to combat it.

Might prove to be a good time to contemplate replacing my X570/5800X3D/DDR4 package and repurposing it to my sons PC and giving myself a healthy upgrade.

 

[kondamin]

looks nice, would have preferred a bigger GPU and no NPU

The Q4 battle for high end PC CPU's will be awesome, Intel will launch their latest and I suspect AMD will time Ryzen 9000 X3D to combat it.

Might prove to be a good time to contemplate replacing my X570/5800X3D/DDR4 package and repurposing it to my sons PC and giving myself a healthy upgrade.

that system is still very nice, hold off until summer 2025 when supply issues are sorted out and prices normalize

 

[ymdhis]

Arguably been the case for a while for ultrathins. I'm under the impression that it'd be lucky to get a user replaceable SSD in that segment.

Desktop processors are a different matter, though I do expect impressions to change, if integrated DRAM show clear & present performance advantages compared to traditional parts of the same architecture. There's bound to be a transitional period, if it ever goes there.

If they released Strix Halo on a desktop, with minimum 32GB integrated, I'd easily switch to it as long as it has a decent mATX board.

It would be the king of SFF machines.

 

[faquino]

One thing is for sure: Intel does know how to make great presentation slides.

 

[N/A]

So there is no reason fo Arrow lake to be more than a single tile, since the PCH comes with the motherboard anyway. I hope very much that we get 8P+16E and SOC on a single tile. the GPU tile could be optional.

 

[azrael]

Not really that impressed. Maybe actual tests will change my mind.

Also, @W1zzard, please stop with the whole AI PC stuff. It's already bad enough to have to listen to that latest buzzword from Big Tech. No need to sully great publications such as TPU with it.

 

[Assimilator]

While I do appreciate tech deep dives like this, I do have to question the choice to make Lunar Lake the subject, given that the audience of this site is overwhelmingly users who care about desktop, not ultraportable. I also have to question the wisdom of using the numbers from Intel's marketing slides, as every company lies, but Intel lies more.

 

[darkangel0504]

Both tiles are made by TSMC and nothing by Intel Foundry apart from packaging with Foveros? Looks like it's going to be expensive.

Don't worry, gov will print money then give to Intel so that Intel can sell those CPUs at reasonable price.

 

[VulkanBros]

Might prove to be a good time to contemplate replacing my X570/5800X3D/DDR4 package and repurposing it to my sons PC and giving myself a healthy upgrade.

Exactly my thought ;-)