The rumor mill is spinning with information about Intel’s Lunar Lake processors – chips that may not debut until 2025 (or perhaps very late in 2024) – and those revelations have met with some disappointment.
However, there are reasons why we should not get carried away with this, and the first is that anything heard about the vine early in the development of any given product should be viewed with great caution.
In any case, let’s outline these rumors surrounding Lunar Lake before we dissect and criticize them – although a crucial point to remember is that these CPU’s power-saving efforts are focused on laptops (and will be a bit like Intel’s Ice Lake, we’re told) . They come after Arrow Lake processors, which will be Intel’s new Core CPUs for next year, later in 2024.
As revealed in a recent video from YouTube leaker Moore’s Law is Dead (MLID), Lunar Lake chips could run with a top configuration of only four performance cores (Lion Cove) and four efficiency cores (Skymont).
Further, PC gamer saw Twitter-based hardware leaker Bionic Squash think Lunar Lake silicon will come in at 64 Xe2 (Battlemage) Execution Units (EUs) for integrated graphics, which is less than some people expected.
Analytics: It’s all about efficiency
Those rumored specs have led to disappointment online, as we noted at the outset. 4+4 performance and efficiency cores sound rather disappointing, and more EUs were expected for the integrated graphics (as you can see in the replies to the tweet above).
But keep your proverbial horses here. Remember, Lunar Lake is supposedly all about power efficiency for laptops, not pure performance. (In 2025, Arrow Lake Refresh may be what Intel has planned for the final division in the notebook arena – again according to MLID’s latest rumor). Lunar Lake will be ultra-low-power (15W) chips to fit into thin and light laptops, and should deliver plenty of performance for their size and specs.
Remember, Lunar Lake will feature significant architectural progress from where we are today. And of course, even if the advanced Battlemage integrated GPU only has 64 EUs, that will still compare very favorably to current-gen Alchemist graphics with more EUs, as it’s made architectural advances once again.
All in all, Lunar Lake is likely to mean some excellent performance for lightweight laptops, and hopefully for affordable gaming notebooks as well. And what’s more, all the specs mooted here may eventually be more powerful by the time 2025 rolls around, the most likely detonation date for Lunar Lake (although, as mentioned, there’s a chance of a very late debut in 2024).