Intel Lunar Lake leak suggests a powerful laptop CPU that runs rings around Meteor Lake

Intel's Lunar Lake mobile processors, which will, with any luck, arrive towards the end of this year, could offer a huge leap in performance compared to current Meteor Lake chips in laptops.

According to new info provided by a respected leaker on X (formerly Twitter), Bionic_Squash, Lunar Lake chips at 17W will be almost 1.5x faster in multi-threaded tasks than Meteor Lake-U (low power) at 15W. (VideoCardz spotted the tweet, by the way).

That's going by CineBench 23 and Geekbench 5 results, we are told, and that is a massive jump in efficiency if it's correct (adding a healthy portion of seasoning is standard procedure for rumors, particularly when a product isn't yet imminent).

For just a couple of extra Watts, we will, in theory, get a 50% jump in performance from Lunar Lake, which is why this processor is expected to be absolute gold for the world of thin-and-light laptops. As obviously with such notebooks you're pretty constrained as to the power usage and thermals, given a slim and compact laptop chassis.

There is one point to note here, though, namely that this apparent 17W Lunar Lake silicon will require single fan cooling. There will be passive (fanless) chips with this mobile family, mind, but those will be 8W parts if the leaks are right. Also according to previous spillage, Lunar Lake could potentially have up to 30W processors.

Hyper-threading? Who needs it...

Remember that Lunar Lake will achieve the mentioned performance levels without having hyper-threading, which Intel has dropped here (and from Arrow Lake, too).

The mentioned Lunar Lake processor is a 4+4 configuration (performance/efficiency cores) compared to a Meteor Lake U 2+8 CPU. (But the latter does have hyper-threading for those two performance cores, and also 2 further low-power cores on the backburner, which all helps for multi-threaded tasks).

Lunar Lake is for premium thin-and-lights as mentioned, and from what we've heard from the rumor mill, Arrow Lake - which it might arrive alongside late in 2024, or very close to it - will cover beefy chips (HX) and also very low power (U) products (add salt again). Although all eyes are on Arrow Lake mostly for its beefy desktop CPUs, of course.

Finally, it's worth remembering that the debut of the chips is one thing, but Lunar Lake actually being present in a good number of laptops will take some time. It won't be until some way into 2025 that there'll be a good array of those notebooks on shelves, no doubt - generally speaking, mobile CPU launches take some time to be fully realized.