Intel’s upcoming Lunar Lake CPUs have been spotted in the wild. We’re looking at an early sample (A1 stepping) with 8 cores and 8 threads, implying that hyper-threading (like Arrow Lake) is absent. The processor features 12MB of L3, 14MB of L2, and 832KB of L1 cache. The L3 is shared among the P and E cores, while the L2 blocks are exclusive to individual P-cores or a quad-cluster of E-cores. Ergo, this is a 4P+4E configuration consisting of 4 Lion Cove and 4 Skymont cores.
The P-cores are expected to feature 2.5MB of L2 cache per core, leaving the remaining 4MB for the E-core cluster. The CPU has a base clock of 1.80GHz and an operating frequency of 2.78GHz, which is modest for an engineering sample. It is paired with 32GB of LPDDR5/5x memory and features an integrated NPU like Meteor Lake.
Here’s all we know about the Lunar Lake processors
- Lunar Lake is expected to land alongside Arrow Lake in the second half of 2024.
- It’ll feature the same core architectures (Lion Cove and Skymont) as Arrow Lake.
- Unlike Arrow Lake, it’ll be fabbed on TSMC’s N3P process node.
- Its NPU unit will be 2 to 3 times faster than the one on Meteor Lake.
- The iGPU tile is also expected to offer a healthy 20-40% uplift over the Xe-LPG unit powering Core Ultra.
- According to Xino, the Lion Cove core will feature an additional L0 cache layer derived from a (renamed) L1 cache. The L1 cache will be a latency-reduced L2 cache layer with a similar width as traditional L2 buffers. It will be a data cache (output).
