Intel at Hot Chips 2024: Lunar Lake has over 20% more MT, ST performance than Meteor Lake

Intel has detailed its next-generation Core Ultra 200V series "Lunar Lake" processors at Hot Chips 2024 this week, highlighting major 3x improved latency and bandwidth improvements over Meteor Lake.

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The company will launch its new Lunar Lake CPUs as its new flagship SoC for the next-gen of AI PCs, with a breakthrough in x86 power efficiency -- up to 40% lower SoC power consumption. Intel promises "exceptional core performance" with similar single-threaded performance at half the power.

Intel says its new Xe2-based Battlemage GPU inside of Lunar Lake chips will offer a "massive leap in graphics" performance, with 50% more gaming performance from the integrated GPU inside of Lunar Lake -- Battlemage -- versus the integrated GPU inside of current-gen Meteor Lake chips: Alchemist. There will be "unmatched AI compute" performance from Lunar Lake with up to 120 TOPS platform-wide (CPU, GPU, NPU combined).

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Lunar Lake will be limited to only 32GB of RAM, because Intel is using on-package memory technology for the new Core Ultra 200V series processors. This means that each Lunar Lake CPU shipped will feature either 16GB or 32GB of LPDDR5X-8533, sitting right next to the CPU, GPU, and NPU on the Lunar Lake chip.

• Read more: Intel's next-gen Core Ultra 200V series 'Lunar Lake' launching on September 3
• Read more: Intel shows off its next-gen Lunar Lake, Xeon 6, Guadi 3 chips at Hot Chips 2024
• Read more: Intel Core Ultra 9 288V turns up on Geekbench, flagship 'Lunar Lake'
• Read more: Intel Core Ultra 200V 'Lunar Lake' leaked: Core Ultra 9 288V the new flagship CPU
• Read more: Intel Core Ultra 5 238V 'Lunar Lake' CPU spotted with 32GB on-package memory
• Read more: Intel's next-gen Lunar Lake-MX spotted: new CPU cores, Xe2 GPU, and on-package memory

Intel wlil be introducing new Lion Cove P-Cores inside of Lunar Lake, with an overhaul of the architecture and generational IPC performance improvements and future scalability. The Lion Core P-Cores have AI-based power management, up to 12MB of shared L3 cache, an enhanced memory subsystem, and up to 14% more IPC performance over the previous-gen Redwood Cove P-Cores.

Redwood Core P-Cores are inside of Meteor Lake right now, so Lunar Lake out of the gate has a decent 14% average IPC improvement on the Lion Cove P-Cores.

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Lunar Lake will have Lion Cove P-Cores, but it'll also have Skymont E-Cores that have been improved, too. There's up to 38% more performance out of the Skymont IPC over the Meteor Lake LP E-Cores in single-threaded integer performance, while up to a whopping 68% IPC improvement in single-threaded FP performance.

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Next up, the next-gen Xe2 "Battlemage" GPU inside of Lunar Lake which promises 50% more gaming performance over the Xe "Alchemist" GPU inside of Meteor Lake. There's up to 67 TOPS of AI performance from the Battlemage "Xe2" GPU, with new XMX engines, 8 2nd Gen Xe Cores, eDP 1.5 support, 8 larger ray tracing units, 8MB of L2 cache, and more.

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Intel is all about AI obviously, with the next-gen NPU4 inside of Lunar Lake having an increased NPU size allowing it to run next-gen AI workloads, increased clock speeds and efficiency, and has been optimized for modern AI.

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The new NPU4 inside of Lunar Lake is the largest integrated and dedicated AI accelerator for the AI PC, says Intel, with up to 48 TOPS of AI performance.

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All in all, Lunar Lake has 20% more multi-threaded performance with lower core counts, more than 20% more single-threaded performance, but more importantly, delivers the same single-threaded performance that Meteor Lake does, but at 50% less power.

Intel plans more than twice the performance-per-watt in productivity, AI throughput that is 3x the throughput across the NPU, GPU, and CPU. Then there's Battlemage, offering a 50% leap in gaming performance, while on battery life, Lunar Lake reduces the SoC power by up to 40% which is a "major step for mobile in which users will notice".