Introduction

Intel today unveiled its Core Ultra 200V mobile processor series, codenamed Lunar Lake. This processor marks a fundamental shift in the way Intel creates processors, through a high degree of aggregation, including memory-on-package (MoP). The Core Ultra 200V series targets a very specific kind of device—one that's thin-and-light, yet very capable to power the AI PC of today—including Microsoft's latest Copilot+ experiences—through on-device acceleration.

The PC industry is experiencing an explosion of client AI applications—from simple things like image manipulation, background blurring or live language translation, to complex content generative tasks. Microsoft decided that the NPU (neural processing unit) together with a certain amount of AI inferencing power, is what unlocks most of these AI experiences. CPU is a very inefficient way to accelerate AI, as are GPUs. All GPU vendors now integrate AI acceleration hardware with their main SIMD machinery, and for the kind of AI experiences Microsoft has planned, such as Windows Recall, which requires the AI to be always running; keeping a GPU running all the time would impose too much of a power cost. The answer is the NPU—a device that meets a flat performance target (in this case, the 40 TOPS required for Copilot+), at a significantly lower power draw than the CPU cores or the GPU.



Intel Core Ultra 200V Lunar Lake isn't just a processor, it is a system on a chip (SoC), there is no chipset beyond this package. There's no separate system memory, either—the processor comes with up to 32 GB of LPDDR5X memory. Intel has been making processors with hybrid CPU cores for years now. The idea behind hybrid has been to have two (or more) kinds of CPU cores that operate at different performance-per-watt bands so that the processor could better respond to software processing loads. The performance cores (or P-cores) are brought up to deal with intense compute workloads; while the efficiency cores (or E-cores) are prioritized to deal with most kinds of idle or low priority workloads. The Intel Thread Director is a hardware component that works the magic of making sure the right kind of CPU core deals with a given workload.

With Lunar Lake, Intel has updated the microarchitecture of all four key components of its SoC—the CPU compute complex introduces two new generations of CPU cores; the integrated graphics (iGPU) debuts a new graphics architecture; and the NPU has been both updated and supercharged to meet Copilot+ AI PC requirements. Besides these, there are many on-silicon updates Intel made. The decision to go with a memory-on-package design has to do with where the competition is—the Apple M3 and Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite have tiny PCB footprints, and very tight power budgets, but are able to offer contemporary AI PC experiences in a thin-and-light form-factor. This is what Intel is after, and Lunar Lake builds on the innovation of both Meteor Lake and Lakefield series packaging and microarchitecture.

In this article, we bring you a technical deep-dive into the Core Ultra 200 MX processor, and the Lunar Lake microarchitecture diving it. As of this writing, Intel hasn't announced specific processor models. They probably will do so in their Computex reveal.