Laptops using Intel's 14th generation Meteor Lake series of processing chips are just about to flood the market, but now, at the COMPUTEX Taipei event, Intel has shown their 15th generation series of processing chips for laptops called Intel Lunar Lake.
The Intel Lunar Lake processing chip features the same technologies used in Meteor Lake such as the use of overlapping tile technology that separates computing processing tasks, graphics, AI and other computer controls such as graphics, display, input and output and so on.
Hyperthreading is a feature introduced by Intel where the cores in the CPU can be divided to move different tasks. Lately, Intel has changed the way they use these power threads. With the introduction of the performance core (Performance) and efficiency (Efficiency), Intel is seen to have shown the hyperthreading feature only on the performance core.
With Lunar Lake, Intel will no longer use hyperthreading because the performance of this processing chip is finally at a level where laptops do not need it for the tasks they carry out.
In fact, the Intel Lunar Lake processing chip will come with a basic option of four performance cores and four efficiency cores as basic specifications. On Meteor Lake, the processing chips come with low-power efficiency cores (low-power E-cores) that are activated when the laptop uses very low computing power.
For Lunar Lake, we were told that the features of the low-power E-Core component have already been incorporated into the original E-Core core, where the power consumption of the core can be lowered as low as possible (0.8-1.0W) and can be increased and changed to a performance core when required automatically.
In fact, Intel says that with the changes made to Lunar Lake, power consumption on this latest chip can be estimated to be 40 percent lower compared to the previous model, Meteor Lake. The power consumption of some software such as Microsoft Teams, for example, is 35 percent lower when compared to Meteor Lake.
Turning to artificial intelligence capabilities, the NPU chip on Lunar Lake shows a slight increase from 10 TOPS on Meteor Lake to 48 TOPS on the new CPU series which allows the laptop to run AI tasks in the computer faster and more efficiently.
Another notable change is that the Lunar Lake chip will come with built-in memory, similar to what is seen on Apple Silicon processing chips and mobile processing chips offered by companies such as Qualcomm and MediaTek.
The Lunar Lake processing chip will come with optional memory support of up to 32GB and will use LPDDR5X memory modules that will be installed directly on the processing chip. This is different from before where the memory chip is soldered to the motherboard.
This new design features laptops with smaller motherboards, allowing laptop brands to add support for other components such as additional storage or larger batteries.
This chip is also combined with the latest Intel Xe2 processing chip that will show a 1.5x improvement in graphics performance compared to the previous Intel Xe graphics chip, and also comes with 67 TOPS for processing AI tasks.
Combined with the ability from the CPU side, Intel says the Lunar Lake chip will come with the ability to process artificial intelligence tasks as high as 120 TOPS, making it one of the processing chips with the best AI capabilities that will arrive on the market soon.
What is even more interesting is that this Xe2 graphics chip will also come with eight built-in Ray-tracing processor units, and Intel confirmed that this Xe2 chip will also be used in the development of the Intel Battlemage graphics card which is expected to be shown either at the end of this year or early next year.
The media control component shows the same AV1 codec support as before, with the addition of VVC (Versatile Video Coding) codec support that uses the H.266 format to support smaller video files but with high resolution and processing.
The media controller and display on the Lunar Lake also show improvements, where the Lunar Lake display controller adds support for eDP 1.5, DisplayPort 2.1 and HDMI 2.1 where the laptop is given the option to support three displays through a single plug.
Apart from that, Intel also confirmed that laptops powered by Lunar Lake chips will come with support for at least two Thunderbolt 4 plugs, and the addition of third plug support if needed.
Intel says that laptops with Lunar Lake processing chips will be introduced around the third quarter of this year, and expects that more than 230 AI computer models will be introduced.