Intel announced details of its future lineup of laptop CPUs last week. These Lunar Lake processors will no longer feature multithreading for the first time in the history of modern Intel laptop processors.

The next generation of Intel laptop chips will stick with one thread per core. Intel is fully focused on efficiency with Lunar Lake. At Computex, the company shared important details about the future chip architecture, which will be followed by Meteor Lake.

Multithreading, in which a processor core can process two instruction streams simultaneously, has been the standard for Intel Core chips for more than two decades. It is very striking that the manufacturer is now abandoning this technology. With the introduction of the P and E cores, hyperthreading technology (as Intel itself calls multithreading) was already limited to the performance cores, which soon would no longer be able to process even two threads.

Intel wants to deliver an efficient processor at all costs. Multithreading requires more power, which is why the name itself compromises efficiency. For those who use their laptop for light workloads, this won’t hurt much, but for the more active multitasker, it will make a difference.

No ambition for performance

AMD continues to focus on multithreading. Intel no longer seems to have the ambition to score highly in terms of pure performance with Lunar Lake. However, it remains difficult to predict what concrete impact a laptop with multiple P and E cores under the hood will have.

In addition, Intel is introducing some significant changes in the architecture. For example, the chipmaker is placing the DRAM memory on Lunar Lake on the CPU. This reduces latency and increases performance compared to DRAM traditionally connected via the motherboard. However, this means that you as a user can no longer replace or upgrade the memory. It is also worth noting that Intel will bake Lunar Lake at TSMC (3 nm for the CPU chip).

Complex Core Ultra

No multithreading, integrated memory and not built in the company’s own factory: Intel Lunar Lake promises to be an interesting chip. Of course, Intel brings the necessary AI-TOPS to the CPU, but that remains irrelevant for almost all the classic tasks you do on your laptop.

Intel Lunar Lake will be officially launched in early September. Details about the individual processors will also be released. Normally, Lunar Lake CPUs will live under the Core Ultra banner, but it is already clear that a performance comparison with previous chips, but also with CPUs from AMD, will be complex.