Intel launches Lunar Lake, its next entrant into its Core Ultra series of laptop processors, today at Computex, ushering in a new generation of AI-infused Copilot+ PCs (see page 7) that have been initially overshadowed by Qualcomm. Stop us if you’ve heard this before: Intel is prioritizing low power, perhaps feeling the pressure from Qualcomm’s just-launched Snapdragon X Elite. Several tweaks to Lunar Lake’s design, however, including shifting all of the E-cores to a low-power architecture, resulted in power savings and performance boosts. The Xe2 GPU at the heart of Intel’s Battlemage is here. Oh, and hyperthreading? Gone.
But there’s a fairly major change that affects you, a potential laptop buyer: Intel is embedding the DRAM onto the chip package. Yes, the PC’s memory. For now, if you buy a Lunar Lake laptop, you’ll have a choice between 16GB and 32GB of DRAM, but with no option to upgrade it later.
Yes, there’s AI. As chief executive Pat Gelsinger said at its Compute keynote: “Every device will be an AI device. Every company will be an AI company.”
We’re diving deep into Lunar Lake in this story, so feel free to jump ahead to the section you’re interested in. We’d expect Intel to eventually market Lunar Lake as the Intel Core Ultra Series 2, the unofficial 15th-gen Core chip.
LUNAR LAKE: MADE IN TAIWAN?
First, let’s be clear: Though Intel announced Lunar Lake at Computex, this isn’t a product yet. Intel is working with early production steppings, but Lunar Lake (and presumably laptops) won’t ship until sometime in the third quarter.
IFA, the Berlin trade show that begins Sept. 6, is the projected launch venue, sources at notebooks vendors say. Arrow Lake, the next iteration of Intel’s desktop processors (and possibly mobile chips for ), are also due this year and could launch around
