Intel Unveils Lunar Lake Laptop CPUs As Current Gen Core Ultra Chips Hit The Market

With the second quarter of 2024 underway, Intel, and partners like Lenovo, have been rolling out the current-gen Intel Core Ultra (codename: Meteor Lake) processors into the wider consumer market. But at Intel Vision 2024, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger showcased the new Lunar Lake processor, the company’s next-gen laptop chip.

Even as the AI PC revolution is underway, the rate of development is moving at a frenzied pace.

Intel claims its upcoming Lunar Lake CPUs will have over 100 Tera Operations Per Second (TOPS) of AI performance, with 45 TOPS coming from the neural processing unit (NPU) specifically.

TOPS is a measure of how fast a computer chip can crunch numbers which is used heavily for AI processing it’s like having more calculators working on the problem at once.

However, TOPS isn’t the whole story. Just like with cars, a bigger engine doesn’t always mean a better car as the wider ecosystem of partners need to be able to tap into that power to make it work in your own personal context. Some AI tasks might require different types of calculations thus a higher TOPS doesn’t tell you exactly what kind of math the chip is good at.

Intel’s CEO has stated that Lunar Lake and its desktop counterpart Arrow Lake will have triple the AI performance of Intel’s current Meteor Lake chips, which have up to 34 TOPS of AI performance total from the NPU, GPU, and CPU cores.

A breakdown of Lunar Lake’s TOPS garners 45 TOPS from the NPU, with the remaining 55 TOPS or so likely coming primarily from the GPU. This is a significant increase over Meteor Lake, whose NPU contributes 11 of its 34 total TOPS.

For the layman, it sounds like the mobile phone megapixel race once again and if you’re looking to get into the AI PC game, it might be prudent to take a wait-and-see approach for the time being.