From what Dan Rogers, Vice President and General Manager, Client Performance Marketing Lab, Client Computing Group, Intel, says, it is to be understood that laptops with the company’s latest Lunar Lake chips will be far more power efficient than Intel’s first generation of AI PC chips.
In an exclusive interaction at the Intel Tech Tour held in Taipei, Taiwan, Rogers confirmed this to indianexpress.com, saying,”Lunar Lake has a 40 per cent lower power package reduction compared to the Meteor Lake, inclusive of the memory.”
Intel, on Tuesday, at the Computex 2024 event, unveiled its next-generation AI processors code-named “Lunar Lake,” with a dedicated neural processing unit (NPU) with up to 48 trillions of operations per second (TOPs) of AI performance. This, according to Rogers, “offers both cost and power reduction benefits.”
Rogers also said that “boards with Lunar Lake processors are quite small, which will help reduce weight, and will make space for a bigger battery in a similar chassis. The reduced board size can also reduce the board cost a bit.”
Intel has confirmed that a Lunar Lake system on chip (SoC) will offer up to 32 GB of RAM, while even the entry-level stock keeping unit (SKU) will have at least 16 GB of RAM. This is twice the 8 GB RAM offered on the Apple Silicon that powers the latest generations of MacBook Air and MacBook Pro.
Intel has also achieved huge strides in terms of AI performance on Lunar Lake. These chips offer a total AI performance of up to 120 TOPs with the central processing unit (CPU) offering up to 5 TOPs, the NPU offering up to 48 TOPs, and the Xe2 graphics processing unit (GPU) delivering up to 67 TOPs.
According to the numbers shared by Intel, the NPU on the Lunar Lake is slightly more powerful than the one on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus, which offers up to 45 TOPs of AI performance.
The upcoming Lunar Lake chips are likely to power Intel-based Copilot+ PCs, launching in the second half of the year, and are likely to go head-to-head with the ARM-based Copilot+ PCs.
When we asked Rogers about the presence of a dedicated AI accelerator, despite the GPU capable of offering more AI inferencing capabilities, he said, “GPU will have a higher power budget across the client architecture, including Lunar Lake, while the NPU will be a power optimised architecture.”
“While a GPU offers peak AI performance, useful on tasks like an on-device image generation, if an AI program needs to be running on a device at all times or in the background, it is a great use case for an NPU,” Rogers said.
Rogers also affirmed that “Lunar Lake will not be limited to laptops, but will also come in other form factors such as small form factor desktops.” These are usually called mini PCs.
Intel has also announced a new developer kit with a Lunar Lake processor. This can be upgraded to a next-generation processor in the future.
Intel is betting big on Lunar Lake processors, which can be called their flagship product, with several first-on-an-Intel chip features. The first set of Lunar Lake-powered laptops will roll out globally by the end of 2024, and some of these machines are expected to offer on-device generative AI capabilities.
The writer is in Taiwan, Taipei, on the Invite of Intel India.
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First uploaded on: 04-06-2024 at 08:30 IST
Deepak Sen is a tech enthusiast who covers the latest technological innovations, from AI to consumer gadgets. His articles provide readers with a glimpse into the ever-evolving world of technology.
