Intel Promises Lunar Lake With 45 TOPS NPU For Holiday 2024 Laptops
At Intel Vision 2024, CEO Pat Gelsinger got up on stage to tell the live audience both in Phoenix and on the internet about Intel's vision for its role in the AI-powered future. He talked about many things, including the upcoming Gaudi 3 AI accelerators as well as revealing the name of the next-generation Xeon CPUs: Xeon 6. We wrote about those already this morning, though. This post is about something else entirely -- Lunar Lake.
Gelsinger didn't talk at length about Lunar Lake, so there's not a ton of new information. However, he did say that the chips are expected to deliver over 45 TOPS of NPU throughput. That's as much AI compute as exists on the entirety of an AMD Hawk Point SoC in just the NPU of a Lunar Lake chip, and a huge upgrade over the Core Ultra (Meteor Lake) NPU. Factor in the CPU cores and GPU and Lunar Lake is expected to achieve about 100TOPs in total.
Intel's Michelle Johnston Holthaus holds up a Lunar Lake package at CES 2024.
We've come into contact with Lunar Lake a few times now, but the first official sighting of one of the ultra-mobile processors was back at this year's CES. Intel's EVP and GM of its Client Computing Group, Michelle Johnston Holthaus, held up one of the tiny Lunar Lake processors on stage, proclaiming that it was a finished package. Before that, we saw a live demo of Lunar Lake on stage at Intel's Innovation '23 event in September.
Lunar Lake is expected to pack in four Lion Cove P-cores and four Skymont E-cores alongside the first shipping GPU to use the Xe2 architecture, which will make it a very close relative to the "Battlemage" discrete GPU. You can see in the pictures on-package LPDDR5X memory, which should offer high transfer rates and low latency at the cost of easy upgrades and cheap repairs. According to Gelsinger, they'll be in laptops on store shelves in time for the holiday season this year.
