Watch out, Apple – Microsoft could work with Intel to optimize Lunar Lake CPUs for Windows 11 to handle M3 silicon
Intel’s Lunar Lake mobile chips have been the subject of another leak – there have been a few recently – with an alleged photo of one of the laptop chips shared, and some details on how these processors should actually work well with Windows 11.
Just a quick refresher: Lunar Lake is a low-power silicon designed to be very power efficient and ideal for the best thin and light laptops, and these next-generation chips are expected to arrive later this year.
The mentioned photo of a Lunar Lake MX processor (see it below and add your own salt) comes from the German tech site Igor’s laboratoryand shows that the silicon uses a multi-chiplet configuration with built-in LPDDR5X RAM in the mix.
As previously rumored, the most powerful Lunar Lake CPU will work with four performance cores and four efficiency cores.
While that may sound a bit weak, remember that these are CPUs designed for thin laptops – like the MacBook-like Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro – and they should be powerhouses, but only relative to their size and power range.
Okay, we said at the beginning that Lunar Lake performed well with Windows 11, so what’s the deal with that? Igor tells us that Intel’s mobile CPUs were developed in collaboration with Microsoft to be optimized for Windows. Basically, the hardware and software are created with each other in mind to ensure better overall performance.
Analysis: It’s a kind of battle magic
The happy takeaway for those thinking about a Windows 11 laptop with Lunar Lake later in 2024 (or even 2025) is that this is yet another sign that the performance of Intel’s next generation of mobile processors should be even better than expected. And as you may recall, those expectations are already high, as Lunar Lake reportedly has several high-end cards in store, for example to boost battery life even further or make PC games look better.
Speaking of games, it’s worth noting that Igor also confirms that Battlemage, or 2nd generation Arc, will be used with Lunar Lake’s integrated graphics, and that’s a long-awaited development for faster frame rates in slim and portable gaming laptops.
Both Intel and Microsoft have a vested interest in making Lunar Lake something special, with an eye on surpassing Apple’s thin MacBooks, which now have M3 silicon in the Air and Pro models. A closer relationship between Intel’s hardware and Microsoft’s operating system will certainly contribute to this.
The other line of attack against MacBooks for Microsoft is ARM-powered laptops, which will be armed (ahem) with the incoming Qualcomm Snapdragon years, we hear.
Clearly, Microsoft is aiming to pack some pretty big punches in the land of laptops in 2024, and all of these devices will obviously be AI PCs that push Copilot harder (and that special Copilot key, which will obviously be controversial to turn out).
Through Tom’s hardware