Intel Unveils Lunar Lake: Their SoC with Striking Similarities to Apple Silicon

At CES in Las Vegas, Intel showcased its low-power Intel Lunar Lake SoC, which shares many similarities with Apple’s Silicon SoCs. The reason for this is that the system’s RAM memory is integrated within the SoC’s packaging. This brings numerous benefits, but the most apparent disadvantage is related to future capacity expansions or paying a higher premium for more advanced storage options.

Regardless of the memory cost, it’s important to remember that this is the future. The future involves a single company offering a processor, graphics card, memory, and NPU on the same silicon. This is what Apple does, and in addition to significantly improving its profits, the company takes the opportunity to substantially inflate prices.

Intel Lunar Lake SoCs are expected to arrive by the end of 2024.

Following the launch of Intel Core Ultra processors, the company’s next major release will be Arrow Lake for desktop computers. This will be their next high-performance processor family, featuring the first CPUs for this market with hardware AI acceleration by adding an NPU – a co-processor focused on handling AI-related tasks.

However, the most significant launch for Intel is Lunar Lake. It’s on track and expected to arrive by the end of this year. Known improvements include Lunar Lake boasting a much more powerful NPU, tripling the performance of its current NPU seen in Meteor Lake. Any other details related to Lunar Lake remain a secret, but it’s expected to be a very low-power CPU with a TDP of up to 30W.

An Intel Lunar Lake CPU is expected to feature a maximum configuration of 8 cores, including 4 high-performance cores and 4 efficient cores. Additionally, a Memory on Package (MoP) design will use Micron’s LPDDR5X memory chips at an impressive speed of 8,533 MHz. Specifically, Lunar Lake will integrate two of these chips in 8 and 16 GB capacities, providing a final configuration of 16 to 32 GB of RAM. Barring any surprises, we won’t have any new information about Lunar Lake until November 2024.

In short, Intel’s aim is for Lunar Lake to compete with chips like the Snapdragon X Elite or the Apple M3.

Intel Arrow Lake CPUs will boast a Battlemage iGPU (Xe 2).

While Intel Meteor Lake (Core Ultra) has impressed with an Intel Arc (Alchemist) iGPU, Arrow Lake will take a step further by using its new Battlemage architecture. It’s worth noting that a new generation of desktop GPUs with a more modern architecture is also anticipated. This will help Intel compete with AMD and NVIDIA in the dedicated graphics market in 2024. For integrated GPUs, this will make it unnecessary to purchase a low-end graphics card for everyday tasks, multimedia, content creation, or gaming.

Intel Arrow Lake will be an enhanced, more powerful version of Meteor Lake for desktop computers. Of course, there will also be a significant emphasis on Artificial Intelligence. 2024 will be the year of AI in consumer computing, so all companies want to pave the way to reap the rewards when that day arrives.