Intel pulled the covers back on its Lunar Lake architecture during its Intel Tech Tour 2024, delivering deep dive architectural details in Taipei, Taiwan in advance of the company’s Computex 2024 keynote as its newest chips race to a Q3 launch. Intel’s Lunar Lake will have significant improvements in every facet of its design. Lunar Lake will primarily target mobile designs, powering some of the best laptops, though many of the fundamental changes will likely carry over to Arrow Lake and will be in some of the best CPUs for gaming.
Every component of the Lunar Lake architecture has been optimized for a refined blend of power and performance that intel says will redefine what we expect from x86 PCs. Some of the biggest improvements come in the E-cores, with 38% and 68% IPC gains in the new Skymont architecture. There's also a 14% IPC gain for the Lion Cove P-cores — though these projections come with caveats. Graphics will see a 50% improvement in iGPU performance with the new Xe2 integrated graphics engine.
Lunar Lake incorporates Intel’s new neural processing unit (NPU) for AI workloads that delivers 48 TOPS of performance, easily providing enough performance to satisfy Microsoft’s requirement of 40 NPU TOPS for next-gen AI PCs. In fact, the Lunar Lake platform has far more AI performance under the hood — in total, it offers 120 TOPS when factoring in the CPU and iGPU.
The resulting Lunar Lake mobile chips employ an entirely new design methodology that focuses on ensuring power efficiency as a first-order priority, and this base architecture will be used as the building block for Intel’s future products, like Arrow Lake and Panther Lake. This new design focus is key to fending off a bevy of strong competitors in the laptop market from AMD, Apple, and now Qualcomm.
Surprisingly, intel turned to TSMC for its leading-edge 3nm N3B process node for its compute tile, which houses the CPU, GPU and NPU. It also uses the TSMC N6 node for the platform controller tile that houses the external I/O interfaces. In fact, the only Intel-fabbed silicon on the chip is the passive 22FFL Foveros base tile that facilitates communication between the tiles and the host system.
Intel says it chose TSMC’s nodes because they were the best available when the company began designing the chip, a nod to its delays on the manufacturing side of the operation as it looks to regain its lead in foundry technology through its five nodes in four years initiative. However, Intel designed the architectures to be easily portable to other process nodes, so we can expect it to return to using its own nodes with many of these same architectures in its future products.
Lunar Lake’s new microarchitectures pave the way for the company’s soon-to-be-announced Arrow Lake processors for the desktop, and even its Xeon 6 lineup, too. Let’s dive into the details.
