While there wasn’t a lot of information at Intel’s Computex presentation, we did get a lot of information outside of it, especially regarding the Lunar Lake processors that are aimed at laptops.
Intel also promised to provide updates on its Arrow Lake desktop processors, but other than confirming a Q4 release, we haven’t received anything. On the other hand, it must be said that it will use the same cores as Lunar Lake, so even if you are not interested in laptops, the changes may be interesting.
Moon Lake
The end of hyperthreading
And before we get to the cores themselves, it should be said that Intel has made some pretty big changes. For the first time in many years, it is abandoning hyperthreading, a technology that allows each core to be split into two threads.
The company says that while this approach has its advantages, it also has certain disadvantages, such as higher consumption. Thus, the company has decided to abandon hyperthreading in favor of larger P-cores, and the threading function will be replaced by E-cores. Either way, this is a very big change and we’ll have to wait to see how it plays out in real-world apps and games.
Lion Cove P-Cores
We have already talked about the new P-cores, they are called Lion Cove. Intel has made quite a few changes under the hood, but without going into too much detail, the company is promising a 14% increase in IPC, or instructions per cycle, over the Redwood Cove cores in Meteor Lak.
In the performance versus consumption graph, we see that the new cores perform best at low values, where the increase can be more than 18%.
Skymont electron cores
Even more interesting are the new Skymont E-cores, which should provide significant IPC gains over Crestmont in Meteor Lake processors. Compared to LP cores, E-core Skymont should have 38% higher IPC for integer and 68% higher IPC for floating point.
Overall, it promises the same performance at a third of the consumption, 70% more performance at the same consumption, and almost twice the performance at higher consumption.
The company also showed results in multi-core performance, which is influenced by the fact that the Low Power Island has 4 cores in the new architecture instead of 2 in Meteor Lak. In any case, Intel again promises a third of the consumption at the same performance, up to three times the performance at the same consumption, and four times the performance at higher consumption.
He didn’t stop there either. The company offered a very interesting comparison with the Raptor Cove P-cores found in the current generation of Raptor Lake desktop processors. According to Intel’s measurements, Skymont has almost the same IPC, and in the performance versus consumption graph we see that Skymont even outperforms the Raptor Cover up to the consumption limit. Of course, the Raptor Cove could go further with consumption and thus increase performance, but it’s still a pretty fascinating comparison.
NPU 4
Lunar Lak will also include a new NPU, which is an AI computing chip. Intel promises twice the throughput of the previous NPU in Meteor Lak and significantly higher performance, namely 48 TOPs.
This meets the 40 TOPs requirement for “Copilot+ PC” set by Microsoft, and laptops with these processors will benefit from all the new Windows 11 features.
iGPU Xe2
Lunar Lake also includes the new Xe2 graphics chip, known as Battlemage on desktops. Compared to Alchemist, it provides about 50% more performance, but I’ll go into more detail about that below.
Memory on the package
Finally, it’s worth noting that for the first time, Intel chips will have RAM directly on them, so the memory won’t be separate.
Intel promises 16 or 32 GB of LPDDR5X memory with speeds of up to 8533 MT/s, while the main advantage over RAM, which is separate, should primarily be lower consumption.
Version
Laptops with Lunar Lake processors are expected to go on sale in the third quarter of this year, from July to September. We don’t know the exact date yet.
Xe2
I’ve already mentioned the Xe2 GPU here, so it’s time to talk about the new architecture.
Intel significantly changed the structure of the entire chip compared to the first generation Alchemist, improving the cores themselves, the cache, ray tracing units, vector engines and other important elements.
In particular, Lunar Lake will receive an iGPU with 8 Xe cores, 64 vector engines, 8 beam racing modules and 8 MB of L2 cache.
The company promises around a 50 percent performance boost over the Xe in Meteor Lak, or the same performance at significantly lower consumption. There has also been a lot of talk about AI performance, which should reach up to 67 TOPs.
Lastly, I’d like to mention the Media Engine since the Xe2 will be the first GPU to support the VVC or H.266 codec. Intel is talking about 90% file size at the same quality as AV1. However, it must be said that VVC support will only be for decoding, not for encoding.
By the way, Intel promises the ability to record in 8K 60 FPS with HDR or three videos simultaneously in 4K 60 FPS with HDR. For lower resolutions, up to 360 fps is supported.
That’s all about Xe2, which will only have Lunar Lake for now. The Arrow Lake desktop is expected to feature the first generation iGPU Xe. And we don’t yet know when we’ll see the release of Battlemage desktop graphics cards.
Source :Indian TV
