Intel
Given its recent manufacturing woes, a resurgent AMD, an incursion by Qualcomm, and Apple’s shift from customer to competitor, it’s been a rough few years for Intel processors. PC buyers have more viable options than they’ve had in years, and in many ways the company’s Meteor Lake architecture was more interesting as a technical achievement than as an improvement over previous-generation Raptor Lake processors.
But even with all that in mind, Intel still provides the vast majority of PC CPUs—nearly four-fifths of all PC CPUs sold are Intel, according to the latest analyst estimates from Canalys. The company still casts a long shadow, and what it does still helps set the pace for the rest of the industry.
Enter the next-generation CPU architecture, codenamed Lunar Lake. We’ve known about Lunar Lake for a while — Intel reminded everyone it was coming when Qualcomm teased it during the reveal of Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC — but this month at Computex the company is going into more detail ahead of availability sometime in the quarter third of 2024.
Lunar Lake will be Intel’s first processor with a neural processing unit (NPU) that meets the requirements of the Microsoft Copilot+ PC. But looking beyond the endless stream of AI news, it also includes improved architectures for its P-cores and E-cores, a next-generation GPU architecture, and several packaging changes that build at the same time and bring back much of the dramatic changes Intel has made to Meteor Lake.
Intel had no more information to share on Arrow Lake, the architecture that will bring Meteor Lake’s big changes to plug-in desktop motherboards for the first time. But Intel says Arrow Lake is still on track to be released in the fourth quarter of 2024 and could be announced at Intel’s annual Innovation event in late September.
Construction on Meteor Lake
Intel
Lunar Lake shares some commonalities with Meteor Lake, including a chiplet-based design that combines many silicon elements into one large one with Intel’s Foveros packaging technology. But in some ways Lunar Lake is simpler and less weird than Meteor Lake, with fewer chips and a more conventional design.
Meteor Lake’s components were spread across four boards: a compute board that was mostly for the CPU cores, a TSMC-made graphics board for the GPU rendering hardware, an IO board to handle things like the PCI Express connection and Thunderbolt, and a grab bag SoC board with a few extra CPU cores, media encoding and decoding engine, display connection, and NPU.
The Lunar Lake only has two functional plates, plus a small “filler plate” that seems to exist only so that the Lunar Lake silicone cover can be a perfect rectangle once it’s all packed together. The motherboard combines all the P-cores and E-cores of the processor, the GPU, the NPU, the display outputs, and the media encoding and decoding engine. And the platform’s controller board handles wired and wireless connectivity, including PCIe and USB, Thunderbolt 4 and Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4.
This is essentially the same division that Intel has used for laptop chips for years and years: a chipset element and a die for the CPU, GPU and everything else. It’s just that now, these two chips are part of the same silicon material, instead of being separated into the same processor package. In retrospect, it seems that some of the most obvious departures from Meteor Lake’s design—the separation of GPU-related functions between different boards, the presence of additional CPU cores within the SoC board—were things Intel needed to do to solved the fact that another company was actually making most of the GPU. Given the opportunity, Intel has returned to a more familiar set of components.
Intel
Another big packaging change is that Intel is integrating the RAM into the CPU package for Lunar Lake, rather than installing it separately on the motherboard. Intel says this uses 40 percent less power, as it shortens the distance needed to travel. It also saves space on the motherboard, which can be used for other components, to make systems smaller or to make more room for the battery. Apple also uses on-package memory for its M-series chips.
Intel says Lunar Lake chips can include up to 32GB of LPDDR5x memory. The downside is that this bundled memory precludes the use of special attached memory modules with compression, which combine many of the benefits of traditional upgradeable DIMMs and bundled laptop memory.