Intel held the first of its twoCES2024 presentations today here in Las Vegas and announced that the company’s Arrow Lake processors for desktop PCs and Lunar Lake for laptop PCs are coming to market in the second half of 2024. Intel’s Michelle Johnston Holthaus, the EVP and GM of the Client Computing Group, said the company is already “in the deep and final stages” of the two new processors.
Arrow Lake will be an extension of the Intel Core Ultra architecture to high-performance desktop PCs for gaming. Holthaus said it will be the first gaming processor for the PC with AI capabilities. That’s a claim AMD will surely dispute, given that itlaunched its own Ryzen chips with AI acceleration capabilities today. Intel’s use of its general Meteor Lake design for laptops, and then putting it into a (presumably) socketed form factor is reminiscent of AMD’s current approach of repurposing its laptop APUs for desktop PCs, too. Interesting.
Holthaus also announced that Lunar Lake would arrive this year for laptops. This new chip has a ‘radically new low-power architecture and significant IPC improvements,’ along with three times more AI performance on both the GPU and the NPU than Meteor Lake. These chips are shipping to Intel’s partners now.
“Our execution on this product has been excellent, and I’m pleased to say that we’re already shipping systems to partners. It’s up and running. It’s doing very well. And Lunar Lake is truly the next level AI performance for thin and light PCs,” Holtahus said.
As you can see in the image above, Holthaus displayed the Lunar Lake chip to the crowd. We can see that this processor has one large die, which could be comprised of multiple tiles/chiplets, and two accompanying structures that appear to be on-package DRAM. We can spot what appears to be three tiles in the Lunar Lake processor.
This design appears to be very similar to thechip we caught on a later-redacted Intle video earlier this year. you’re able to see the shot of that chip below:
Intel posted the above chip to a video,then removed it from public view– but not before I downloaded a copy. This chip is largely thought to be an unreleased Meteor Lake revision with on-package LPDDR5X, much like the Lunar Lake model Intel displayed today. This type of design with on-package memory confers latency and power advantages, not to mention space savings for laptop designs.
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We’re here at the event and will run down more details. Stay tuned.
Paul Alcorn is the Editor-in-Chief for Tom’s Hardware US. He also writes news and reviews on CPUs, storage, and enterprise hardware.
