Intel Lunar Lake Processors to Deliver 48 TOPS NPU, All-New GPU

Intel brought the thunder to Computex today, with new microprocessors for the PC and cloud datacenters. Key among the announcements is its Lunar Lake processor architecture for PCs, which offers significant improvements to efficiency, performance, and AI-accelerated workloads.

“AI is driving one of the most consequential eras of innovation the industry has ever seen,” Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said. “The magic of silicon is once again enabling exponential advancements in computing that will push the boundaries of human potential and power the global economy for years to come.”

Just six months after the previous generation, Intel announced a new generation Xeon 6 processor that offers Efficient cores (E-cores) with rack-level performance gains of up to 4.2x and performance per watt gains of up to 2.6x. And it revealed pricing for its Gaudi AI accelerators, which can run alongside Xeon processors in a data center and deliver significant performance improvements for training and inference tasks on leading generative AI models. But here, of course, we will focus on the PC side of the equation.

Lunar Lake is the second-generation Intel Core Ultra chipset, with integrated CPU, GPU, and NPU on the SoC (system on a chip). Lunar Lake will deliver up to 40 percent lower SoC power and more than 3x the AI compute of its Meteor Lake predecessor. It includes a 4th generation NPU with up to 48 TOPS of hardware accelerated AI performance and up to 4x the generative AI performance found in Meteor Lake.

We knew that was coming, but Intel’s new Battlemage GPU is a surprise: This integrated GPU includes Xe 2 GPU cores for graphics and Xe Matrix Extension (XMX) arrays for AI, Intel says, and it improves gaming performance by 1.5x over Meteor Lake and provides 67 TOPS of AI content creation performance.

Lunar Lake will ship in Q3 2024, in time for the holiday selling season. Intel says that AI PCs will account for almost 60 percent of all new PCs by 2027, and it is working with over 300 independent software vendors (ISVs) to enable over 300 features and 500 AI models across these new chips.

In the short term, however, Intel is keen to highlight its advantages over upstarts like AMD and Qualcomm: It shipped more AI PC processors through the first quarter of 2024 than all its competitors together, and Lunar Lake will power over 80 different AI PC designs from 20 PC makers. The firm expects to deliver over 40 million Core Ultra processors into the market this year alone.

“Lunar Lake represents a massive leap forward in system-on-chip (SoC) efficiency and sets a new benchmark for performance and power management,” an Intel fact sheet explains. “The new power delivery integrated controller, enhanced Thread Director, memory-side cache and improved E-core cluster bring up to 60 percent better battery life in real-life usages. These innovations work together to dramatically extend battery life, ensuring Lunar Lake-based laptops last longer on a single charge.”

Looking ahead, Intel also plans an Arrow Lake generation of PCs for Q4 2024 that will bring its AI prowess to desktop PCs.