One week out from its Lunar Lake reveal event, Intel has made some impressive-sounding claims about its latest architecture. The generational performance gap between it and Meteor Lake should be welcomingly wide. More specifically, the company says its upcoming Core Ultra 200V processors will eclipse their predecessors by 20% and then some.
Intel hopes Lunar Lake allows the company to muscle in on the success Zen 5 has brought AMD in the mobile space. Naturally, it’s too early to tell whether Core Ultra 200V or Ryzen AI 300 processors will emerge as the best CPUs for handhelds or laptops. With Team Blue boasting improvements in excess of 20% in single and multi-threaded applications, though, it’s certain to be an exciting clash of chips.
There are multiple architectural improvements feeding into this performance delta. For starters, Lunar Lake swaps out Intel 4 for TSMC’s more advanced N3B node in the fabrication of its compute tile. However, at Hot Chips 2024 (via WCCFTech), Intel was keen to highlight how improvements in bandwidth and latency also contribute.
Lunar Lake ditches efficient cores altogether, retaining just performance and low power-efficient cores. This simplified design removes the need to house the three core types, as used in Meteor Lake, across the compute and SoC tile. Instead, the two core types both reside on the former, improving latency. Through this change, and some extra cache, Intel claims Lunar Lake performance core and efficient core latency is just 25ns and 55ns, respectively. Compared to Meteor Lake, this makes for a whopping 200% improvement.
That aforementioned cache also boosts bandwidth on Lunar Lake, with Intel doubling core memory bandwidth to 128GB/s from the 64GB/s offered by Meteor Lake.
With all the above in mind, it’s little wonder that Intel feels so confident about Lunar Lake. That 20+% performance improvement is impressive on its own terms, but it becomes all the more dazzling the digger you deep. Team Blue reckons its latest architecture can accomplish this with fewer cores, all while consuming half the power. That’s not forgetting the touted 1.5x boost to integrated graphics too.
It almost sounds too good to be true. Although, it does align with previous performance leaks. We’ll reserve final judgement for when the chips materialise, as we wouldn’t want a repeat of the continued disappointment that is Ryzen 9000.
Intel will formally reveal Lunar Lake on September 3 and the first devices sporting Core Ultra 200V processors shouldn’t be far behind. Here’s hoping that MSI Claw 8 AI Plus is among the first batch of systems to hit the scene.
For more on Lunar Lake, check out our Intel Battlemage guide for all we know about the company’s Xe2 graphics architecture.
