The timely launch of the Core Ultra “Meteor Lake” processors proved that Intel can stick to its roadmap. Now, Team Blue needs to ensure that the next thing they launch is competitive. After Meteor Lake’s lukewarm release, Pat Gelsinger and his team are warming up for the 15th Gen Arrow Lake rollout. Lunar Lake will be released alongside it as a mobile-only platform featuring superior process nodes and upgraded core designs.
According to Bionic_Squash, Lunar Lake will be 50% faster than Meteor Lake-U (15W) at its default 17W TDP. These gains refer to multi-threaded performance increases in content creation workloads like Cinebench and bursty multi-tasking emulated by Geekbench 5. The processors should be even faster at higher TDPs, with 30W being the upper limit for the PL1 (base) power.
The Meteor Lake mobile processors feature up to 10 cores (2P + 8E), while Lunar Lake is expected to offer up to 8 cores (8P + 8E) based on upgraded architectures and an advanced process node. Consequently, it’ll pack fewer cores and threads (no hyper-threading). The compute tile will be fabbed on the 18A process, while the iGPU die will be manufactured on TSMC’s 3nm (N3P) node.
The Lunar Lake P-core architecture will be upgraded from Redwood Cove to Lion Cove, while the E-core will be based on Skymont. The iGPU is expected to leverage the Battlemage graphics architecture (up from Xe-LPG+ on Arrow Lake) with over 8 Xe Cores. It should be at least 20-30% faster than the Meteor Lake iGPU. Lunar Lake will also feature a massively upgraded NPU, offering 3x the throughput of the Core Ultra NPUs.
Lunar Lake is expected to launch in the fourth quarter of 2024, likely in December. It’ll power high-end notebooks and convertibles, offering unprecedented battery life, the likes of which we’ve never seen from Intel chips.
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