Move over Snapdragon — Intel Lunar Lake set to power over 80 new AI laptops this year
Skynet is going to be running the world within the next decade at this rate, as AI continues to become an ever bigger player in the computing space. There’s a lot going on at this week’s Microsoft Build event, with one of the key announcements centering around the future of Intel’s Lunar Lake CPU range.
First up, Inel has announced its new silicon will be with us by the third quarter of this year (thanks, The Verge). What’s more, the iconic chip maker plans to integrate Lunar Lake into over 80 laptop designs spanning 20 laptop manufacturer that will power the 40 million AI PC CPUs Intel is hoping to release before the year is out.
These Lunar Lake laptop processors have also been specifically made to squeeze the most out of new Copilot+ PCs. Said AI-focused portable PCs will sport cool new features, like Recall (a network connected contextual search that can be used to find everything from images, emails to documents), and the AI generative image tool, Cocreator.
According to Intel, Lunar Lake boasts three times more AI performance compared to the company’s existing family of Meteor Lake chips, which is quite the gen-on-gen jump. The firm also claims its new Lunar Lake silicon is 1.4 times faster when it comes to Stable Diffusion 1.5 placed next to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite.
Lunar Lake looks set to play a large role in the success of Copilot+ PCs, as the outgoing Meteor Lake chipset just isn’t quite up to snuff when it comes to executing AI tasks at peak efficiency. By contrast Lunar Lake has a whole lot more going on under the hood, making it a far more suitable chip for AI-focused laptops. Aside from the CPU itself, Lunar Lake chips feature an integrated Xe2 GPU, and an deep-learning NPU (neural processing unit) that can squeeze 40 TOPS (ter operations per second) out of whatever AI laptop it findself itself housed in. By contrast, Meteor Lake chipsets have a mere 10 TOPS in their NPUs.
Intel is clearly becoming a major player in the AI laptop space, and I for one look forward to the first one I buy going rogue and chasing me down with all the efficiency of a certain Austrian cyborg.
