Intel particulars new Lunar Lake CPUs that may go up towards AMD, Qualcomm, and Apple

Given its latest manufacturing troubles, a resurgent AMD, an incursion from Qualcomm, and Apple’s shift from buyer to competitor, it’s been a tough few years for Intel’s processors. Laptop consumers have extra viable choices than they’ve in a few years, and in some ways the corporate’s Meteor Lake structure was extra attention-grabbing as a technical achievement than it was as an improve for previous-generation Raptor Lake processors.

However even given all of that, Intel nonetheless offers the overwhelming majority of PC CPUs—almost four-fifths of all pc CPUs offered are Intel’s, in keeping with latest analyst estimates from Canalys. The corporate nonetheless casts a protracted shadow, and what it does nonetheless helps set the tempo for the remainder of the business.

Enter its next-generation CPU structure, codenamed Lunar Lake. We’ve recognized about Lunar Lake for some time—Intel reminded everybody it was coming when Qualcomm upstaged it throughout Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC reveal—however this month at Computex the corporate goes into extra element forward of availability someday in Q3 of 2024.

Lunar Lake might be Intel’s first processor with a neural processing unit (NPU) that meets Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC necessities. However wanting past the countless circulate of AI information, it additionally contains upgraded architectures for its P-cores and E-cores, a next-generation GPU structure, and a few packaging adjustments that concurrently construct on and revert lots of the dramatic adjustments Intel made for Meteor Lake.

Intel didn’t have extra info to share on Arrow Lake, the structure that may convey Meteor Lake’s huge adjustments to socketed desktop motherboards for the primary time. However Intel says that Arrow Lake remains to be on monitor for launch in This fall of 2024, and it might be introduced at Intel’s annual Innovation occasion in late September.

Constructing on Meteor Lake

Lunar Lake shares a couple of issues in frequent with Meteor Lake, together with a chiplet-based design that mixes a number of silicon dies into one huge one with Intel’s Foveros packaging expertise. However in some methods Lunar Lake is easier and fewer bizarre than Meteor Lake, with fewer chiplets and a extra typical design.

Meteor Lake’s parts have been unfold throughout 4 tiles: a compute tile that was primarily for the CPU cores, a TSMC-manufactured graphics tile for the GPU rendering {hardware}, an IO tile to deal with issues like PCI Specific and Thunderbolt connectivity, and a grab-bag “SoC” tile with a few further CPU cores, the media encoding and decoding engine, show connectivity, and the NPU.

Lunar Lake solely has two purposeful tiles, plus a small “filler tile” that appears to exist solely in order that the Lunar Lake silicon die could be a good rectangle as soon as it’s all packaged collectively. The compute tile combines the entire processor’s P-cores and E-cores, the GPU, the NPU, the show outputs, and the media encoding and decoding engine. And the platform controller tile handles wired and wi-fi connectivity, together with PCIe and USB, Thunderbolt 4, and Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4.

That is primarily the identical break up that Intel has used for laptop computer chips for years and years: one chipset die and one die for the CPU, GPU, and the whole lot else. It’s simply that now, these two chips are a part of the identical silicon die, quite than separate dies on the identical processor bundle. Looking back it looks like a few of Meteor Lake’s most noticeable design departures—the division of GPU-related features amongst totally different tiles, the presence of further CPU cores within the SoC tile—have been issues Intel needed to do to work round the truth that one other firm was really manufacturing many of the GPU. Given the chance, Intel has returned to a extra recognizable assemblage of parts.

One other huge packaging change is that Intel is integrating RAM into the CPU bundle for Lunar Lake, quite than having it put in individually on the motherboard. Intel says this makes use of 40 p.c much less energy, because it shortens the space information must journey. It additionally saves motherboard area, which might both be used for different parts, to make methods smaller, or to make extra room for battery. Apple additionally makes use of on-package reminiscence for its M-series chips.

Intel says that Lunar Lake chips can embrace as much as 32GB of LPDDR5x reminiscence. The draw back is that this on-package reminiscence precludes the utilization of separate Compression-Connected Reminiscence Modules, which mix lots of the advantages of conventional upgradable DIMM modules and soldered-down laptop computer reminiscence.