Intel leak suggests MacBook-beating laptops could trouble Apple sooner than expected
Intel’s Lunar Lake processors have been somewhat under the radar so far, so it’s interesting to see a leak surrounding the future CPUs emerge.
As a quick refresher – the different lakes Intel uses are confusingly numerous – Intel’s next generation chips are Meteor Lake (laptop chips, due in December) and Raptor Lake Refresh (desktop, rumored to launch this month, but that we don’t know, I don’t have any official word on that yet).
Intel’s next launches after these chips are Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake, with the former covering the desktop territory (and laptops too) but the latter will only be mobile processors for notebooks. In particular, Lunar Lake is very focused on achieving excellent energy efficiency for laptops and battery life, while being very energy efficient.
So with all that in mind, the leaked Lunar Lake CPU was spotted in the SiSoftware Sandra benchmark suite, as pointed out by Everest on X (formerly Twitter).
The actual benchmark result doesn’t really tell us much at the moment, as this is still very early, and the specifications aren’t entirely clear either – but the latter is where the juicy nuggets lie.
If Tom’s hardware points out that this processor appears to be a chip with four performance cores and four efficiency cores, supporting an earlier speculation that the top CPU for Lunar Lake here will be a 4+4 configuration.
In other words, what we’ll likely see is the flagship Lunar Lake, albeit obviously an early test version of the processor.
Further detailed specs include boost speeds of up to 3.9GHz and a base clock of 1GHz (obviously something to do with this being a sample chip). Power consumption is listed at 17W, which is again in line with the rumor mill’s expectations – remember that in theory this is also the flagship CPU, which will consume the most power.
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As we’ve mentioned before, while a core count of 4+4 seems rather disappointing for a today’s flagship (mobile) CPU, that’s not really the point with Lunar Lake. These CPUs will try to deliver relatively strong performance for their very low power range, so they can be used in very thin and light laptops and still be a decent engine for performing everyday computing tasks.
That all seems to be happening, and it’s interesting to see that this leaked benchmark supports the previous 4+4 core count rumor.
What’s also notable here is that seeing sample processors now being benchmarked suggests that we may see Lunar Lake arrive in a sooner time frame than past rumors have suggested.
We previously expected Lunar Lake in late 2024, or perhaps early 2025, just after Arrow Lake. But other rumors have suggested it could arrive next to Arrow Lake – itself expected later in 2024. And benchmarks already happening before Lunar Lake seem to support that theory to some extent.
In other words, we could be buying Arrow Lake processors in about a year And Slim laptops powered by Lunar Lake chips. All we keep hearing from Intel about its CPU roadmap is that all future generations are well on their way, and this leak suggests otherwise, that’s for sure.