Intel has officially introduced its Lunar Lake chips. After Qualcomm and AMD, Intel has now also passed the entrance exam for Copilot Plus.

The timing of the announcement of Lunar Lake is no coincidence. Yesterday, AMD caused a stir at Computex with the Ryzen AI 300 chips, and today it is up to Intel to respond. Intel already showed Lunar Lake in September last year and is now officially bringing the chip to market. The first laptops with the chip are expected in the fall.

As in recent years, Intel is working with P-Cores (performance) and E-Cores (energy efficiency). Intel does not bake the chips in-house, but in TSMC’s 3 nm oven. Lunar Lake has two that istwo less than Meteor Lake, which are connected using Foveros 3D technology. Intel also has something special planned for memory: Following Apple’s example, Intel places the memory as close to the processor core as possible.

This does not allow you to add additional RAM to the motherboard, but according to Intel, this reduces latency and power consumption by forty percent. Intel Lunar Lake has 16GB or 32GB of internal RAM. The chip is compatible with the latest standards Wifi 7, Bluetooth 5.4 and PCIe5. Not Thunderbolt 5 yet, but Thunderbolt 4.

48 TOPs or 120?

Forget cores, memory, etc. The only number that seems to matter to chip makers is the number of TOPs (trillion operations per second) that a processor can handle. Although Intel claims to have invented the AI ​​PC, the NPU in Meteor Lake remained well below the limit imposed by Microsoft with 18 TOPs. Lunar Lake passes the entrance exam with 48 TOPs.

Problem: AMD claims the Ryzen AI 300 chips can achieve 50 TOPs. Lunar Lake has another trick up its sleeve to explain AI dominance. The integrated GPU can add another 67 TOPs if needed. Add another 5 TOPs that the CPU adds and you get a total of 120 TOPs. The fact that we even have to do this calculation shows how far the AI ​​pendulum has swung in the chip world.

chase

CEO Pat Gelsinger also looks ahead during Computex. Intel will also launch the Arrow Lake desktop processor in the fall. It will have to compete against the Zen 5 generation announced yesterday by AMD. Intel has not yet revealed many details about this processor. In 2025, Panther Lake will replace Lunar Lake as the mobile processor.

Intel’s announcements show, above all, that the chip giant is not among the frontrunners. Intel hoped to usher in the AI ​​PC era, but got off to a false start and now has to chase it. It was quickly acquired by Qualcomm and AMD and will now be the last major chipmaker to enter the Copilot Plus era.