Lunar Lake is an ultra-low power mobile SoC design. It is a successor to 15 W Meteor Lake-U processors while Arrow Lake replaces the midrange 28 W Meteor Lake-H processors. Lunar Lake's focus on increased power efficiency targets premium ultra-thin laptops and compact mobile designs. Intel said that with Lunar Lake, it aimed to "bust the myth that
[x86] can't be as efficient" as
ARM. Analysis of tests performed on Lunar Lake CPUs available at market launch indicated that, although their multi-core performance was not particularly good under full load, their efficiency under everyday use was good, even if the ARM competition still has its advantages.
Process node Lunar Lake is the first processor design by Intel where all logic dies are entirely fabricated on external nodes outsourced to
TSMC. An analysis by
Goldman Sachs indicated that Intel would be spending $5.6 billion in 2024 and $9.7 billion in 2025 outsourcing to TSMC. In March 2024, Intel's chief financial officer admitted during an investment call that the company was "a little bit heavier than we want to be in terms of external wafer manufacturing versus internal". The following month, Intel disclosed that their foundry business made a $7 billion operating loss during 2023.
Compute tile The Compute tile is Lunar Lake's largest tile. It has expanded functions over Meteor Lake's compute tile which solely housed CPU cores and cache. Instead, Lunar Lake's compute tile houses CPU cores and their cache, the GPU and the NPU. The previous generation Meteor Lake used the
Intel 4 process on its compute tile while Lunar Lake moves to
TSMC's
N3B node. N3B is TSMC's first generation 3 nm node with lower yields compared to the updated N3E node. Lunar Lake's compute tile was originally planned to be built on Intel's
18A node. SMT first made its debut in an Intel desktop processor with the Northwood-based
Pentium 4 in 2002. The last
x86-64 Intel desktop processor lineup not to feature SMT in any way was
Core 2, which was discontinued in 2011. SMT, or Intel's marketing term
HyperThreading, allows a single physical CPU core with 2 threads to execute two tasks simultaneously. In the early 2000s, SMT was a way to add more processing threads to dual and quad-core CPUs while not using too much die space. The removal of SMT allows the physical core die area to be reduced. Increasing the number of processing threads with a greater number of physical cores can compensate for the removal of SMT providing 2 threads per core. Intel's removal of SMT yields a 15% saving in die area and 5% greater performance-per-watt. To counteract the removal of SMT, Intel prioritized executing more instructions per cycle for high single-threaded performance rather than parallel execution. L2 cache per core for Lion Cove is increased to 2.5 MB from Redwood Cove's 2 MB. Lunar Lake is able to exercise more granular control over Lion Cove's boost clocks. Lion Cove's boost clocks are able to increase in increments of 16.67MHz rather than in 100MHz increments. It achieves this with the inclusion of new 8-wide integer ALUs, doubled from Crestmont.
Neural Processing Unit (NPU) Lunar Lake's
Neural Processing Unit (NPU), which performs AI operations locally, in-silicon rather than in the
cloud, has been updated to Intel's "NPU 4" architecture with increased clock speeds. Intel claims that Lunar Lake can achieve a total of 120 int8 TOPS of performance in AI workloads, with 48 int8 TOPS coming from the NPU alone while an additional 67 int8 TOPS come from the GPU and 5 int8 TOPS from the CPU. Lunar Lake's 48 dedicated NPU TOPS meets
Microsoft's requirements for laptops in order to be certified as
Copilot+ PCs.
Microsoft has mandated 40 TOPs on NPU performance in order to run
Copilot locally on
Windows PCs. For comparison, the NPU in Meteor Lake and Arrow Lake processors is able to output 10 TOPs.
Graphics Lunar Lake's GPU features second generation
Xe2-LPG cores based on the Battlemage graphics architecture. The Battlemage architecture launched in Lunar Lake mobile processors before discrete Arc desktop graphics cards. It contains eight Xe2-LPG cores that share an 8 MB L2 cache. The GPU is able to provide up to 67 TOPS of INT8 compute for AI processing. The display engine has three display pipes with
HDMI 2.1,
DisplayPort 2.1 and a new eDP 1.5 connection.
Memory Lunar Lake features on-package
LPDDR5X-8533
RAM available in 16 GB or 32 GB capacities. This on-package memory is a similar approach to
Apple with its M series SoCs that integrate unified LPDDR memory onto the package beside the CPU silicon. On-package memory allows the CPU to benefit from higher memory bandwidth at lower power and decreased latency as memory is physically closer to the CPU. Intel claims that Lunar Lake's on-package memory achieved a reduction of 40% in power consumption and "up to 250 square millimeters" of space. Furthermore, memory that is integrated onto the CPU package means that the overall processor physical footprint in laptops can be reduced as memory does not need to be placed onto a separate board with its own cooling solution. Less complex cooling being required means that Lunar Lake processors can more easily fit in ultra-low power compact mobile solutions. The downside of Lunar Lake's on-package memory is that is not user replaceable or upgradable to higher capacities beyond 32 GB with SO-DIMMs. Due to the inclusion of on-package memory, an additional 2W is added to the
TDP of Lunar Lake processors. Lunar Lake processors have a TDP ranging from 17 to 30W compared to the 15–28W TDP of Meteor Lake-H processors. == List of Lunar Lake processors ==