Intel delves into Lunar Lake: ‘We don’t believe you need to compromise’

Intel’s latest Lunar Lake chips for laptops have made a big splash at Computex. The new CPUs use a radical new architecture and show impressive generational gains, which is something Intel needs as competition heats up from AMD and Qualcomm. To dive deep into the new designs, PCWorld’s Mark Hachman went straight to the source.

Mark interviews Intel’s Dan Rogers (Vice President and General Manager) and Robert Hallock (Vice President and General Manager, Client AI and Technical Marketing) on the big changes for these chips, designed specifically to maximize power and efficiency for thin-and-light laptops. The interview covers a lot of ground, so watch the full thing on YouTube if you have the time.

A lot of the big design changes in Lunar Lake, such as building on-package memory instead of using traditional SO-DIMM cards or getting rid of hyperthreading, are specifically for maximizing efficiency and battery power. “Our mission with Lunar Lake is we wanted to build the most power-efficient x86 architecture there is — period. And we’re feeling pretty confident,” said Rogers.

Hallock claimed that an 8-core Lunar Lake chip (four performance cores, four efficiency cores) can beat a 22-thread Meteor Lake configuration for most tasks, even when the latter has hyperthreading enabled. Another example of how Lunar Lake sips power compared to its predecessor is the new and more efficient E-cores. Intel claims that the new cores can use as little as one-third the power of E-cores on Meteor Lake while in efficiency mode, or spin up for 1.7 times the performance when needed.

Not that these moves necessarily indicate a company-wide or broad strategy for other designs. While the exciting new CAMM2 standard might make it easier to get memory into smaller laptops, it’s still costing too much in power for the Lunar Lake goals. Hyperthreading isn’t automatically dead on other platforms or chip series, either.

Intel was also notably mum on some details, which we’ll have to dig into when Lunar Lake starts making its way to consumers. We still don’t know the specs of individual Lunar Lake CPU models, and we don’t have hard numbers for battery life (though that’s always fairly subjective and dependent upon laptop configuration). If you want the latest on chips from Intel and other CPU makers, be sure to subscribe to PCWorld on YouTube.