Intel Lunar Lake CPUs to Compete With Snapdragon X Elite, Apple’s M4 Chip

Intel Lunar Lake CPUs are expected to arrive later this year, as the chipmaker’s latest processor for laptop computers. They will succeed the current generation Meteor Lake chips and are claimed to offer more than three times the AI performance. Earlier this week, Microsoft announced that new Copilot+ PCs were set to arrive in the coming months with AI capabilities, and the upcoming generation of Intel processors will also be updated with support for these features, according to the company.

In an announcement made earlier this week, Intel revealed that its Lunar Lake CPUs will arrive in Q3 2024 on over 80 laptop models from more than 20 OEMs — these will be updated with support for Copilot+ experiences, but the company stopped short of providing any specifics. The chipmaker also says that it expects over 40 million AI PC chips to be shipped this year.

The new Lunar Lake CPUs from Intel will reportedly be equipped with new CPU cores, as well as a new Intel Xe2 GPU architecture that is capable of over 60 tera operations per second (TOPS), and an enhanced NPU with support for over 45 TOPS. Intel says that the next generation of AI PCs powered by these processors will be able to run over 500 machine learning models, with a cumulative expected performance of over 100 TOPS.

When the new Lunar Lake chips arrive on Copilot+ laptops later this year, they will compete with devices powered by Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X Elite chips and MacBook models powered by M3 (and possibly M4) chips. Intel has reportedly claimed that Lunar Lake is 1.4x faster than the Snapdragon X Elite in Stable Diffusion 15 workloads. It is currently unclear which of these processors will offer the best AI performance using their built-in NPUs, but a clearer picture should emerge later this year.

Because Lunar Lake CPUs are expected to arrive on laptops, these chips are also expected to arrive with improvements to power efficiency — up to 30 percent and 20 percent less power consumed during Microsoft Teams conferencing (with AI effects) compared to the Ryzen 7 7840U and Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3, respectively.

Intel says an advanced low power island will offer “breakthrough battery life”. It’s worth noting that Qualcomm and Apple’s Arm chips also boast high efficiency — Apple’s MacBook Air models are rated to offer over 15 hours of use on a single charge, with excellent standby life. We can expect to learn more about Intel’s upcoming processors in the coming months.