It’s looking like Intel‘s upcoming Lunar Lake architecture CPUs could be the ones for laptop gamers to look out for as Intel has promised a jump in instructions per clock over Meteor Lake and confirmed the new chips will be arriving this year.
Intel Lunar Lake is set to be the successor to Meteor Lake, with the CPUs designed for use in laptops and other mobile devices. While that may not excite many desktop PC gamers, the chips will also be used in gaming laptops so anyone seeking the fastest mobile gaming experience possible will appreciate the “radically new low-power architecture and significant IPC improvements”.
At its CES 2024 Open House presentation where it showed off the new chip, Intel also confirmed the new CPUs will be arriving in 2024, though didn’t specify quite how soon. It’s a reasonable bet, though, that we’ll be looking at a very late 2024 launch.
Interestingly, the new chips are set to be the first from Intel where the main processing cores are built on a non-Intel process. The company has used other chip manufacturers to produce other parts of its chips – such as using TSMC for the graphics portion of Meteor Lake – but this is the first time the x86 processing cores will be non-Intel.
We can see from the sample CPU Intel held aloft that it consists of one large die, but this is almost certainly comprosed of multiple tiles or chiplets, just like Meteor Lake. The chip also appears to have on-package DRAM, allowing for the chip to entirely replace separate DRAM modules or on-motherboard DRAM, potentially saving masses of PCB space.
Less exciting for most gamers but still notable is that the new chips will also have 3X the NPU AI processing power of Meteor Lake. The latter is the first Intel architecture to introduce dedicated AI processing NPU cores on its CPUs – and CES has been awash with talk of how we’re now entering a new world of AI PCs – so the increased power will allow for much faster local generation AI-generated images, text, video, and more.
While Intel Lunar Lake looks exciting for future laptops, if you’re in the market for a laptop now, you can check out our best gaming laptop guide for some buying advice.