Intel recently announced that its upcoming Lunar Lake chips will be available Copilot+ AI is available for PCs this fall, but the company waited until Computex to give us more technical details. First, they will offer up to 48 TOP (tera operations per second) AI performance thanks to an updated neural processing unit (NPU). In comparison, Intel’s previous Meteor Lake chips had 10 TOPS NPUs, while AMD’s Ryzen AI 300 chips yesterday with 50 TOPS NPU. In case you couldn’t tell, the AI race is on.
Intel will once again have to catch up in the AI PC space: AMD’s Ryzen AI 300 chips will launch in July alongside Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus. It’s unclear when the Lunar Lake systems will launch this fall. Still, for Intel loyalists, Lunar Lake looks like a big upgrade. It will also sport a new Xe2 GPU that offers 80 percent faster gaming performance than the last generation, as well as an AI accelerator with an additional 67 TOPS of performance. (We’re still waiting to see how AMD’s new Radeon graphics compare.)
Surprisingly, the Lunar Lake chips will also have on-board memory similar to Apple Silicon. The chips will be available with either 16GB or 32GB of RAM, and like Apple, you won’t be able to add more. By moving memory closer to the processor cores, Intel was able to reduce latency and system power consumption by 40 percent. If you really need more RAM, you’re out of luck. You’ll have to sit tight for Intel’s next chip family, codenamed Arrow Lake.
Additionally, Lunar Lake will feature eight cores with updated performance and efficient cores (P-cores and E-cores). Intel also says the chip has an “advanced low-power island” to handle background tasks efficiently. Thanks to this, among other optimizations, the company claims battery life is 60 percent better than Meteor Lake.
It’s clear that both Intel and AMD will do whatever it takes to combat Qualcomm’s Copilot+ hardware. These mobile chips are inherently more power efficient – they’re said to get more than 20 hours of battery life on Copilot+ Surface devices (we haven’t tested them yet).
When it comes to connectivity, Lunar Lake will offer the updated standards you’d expect: Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, PCIe Gen5, and Thunderbolt 4. (Strangely, Intel isn’t making any commitments on this. Lightning 5 (yet, because it plans to introduce this standard later this year.)
Given how far away Moon Lake actually is, Intel had no further information to share about specific chip models or deeper specs. But according to the company’s specs released in a pre-Computex media briefing, it will be significantly faster than Meteor Lake when running Stable Diffusion, completing 20 iterations in 5.8 seconds compared to 20.9 seconds. Although it draws a few more watts of power, the increased speed should make up for it.
