Computex 2024: Intel Reveals Lunar Lake Processors With New Xe2 Graphics Architecture That Will Power the Upcoming Battlemage GPUs

Intel has now revealed its Lunar Lake chips during Computex 2024, sharing how the new processors are expected to perform. They also divulged details about their new Xe2 GPU, and here’s what to expect from Intel’s latest offerings.

Intel Lunar Lake processors

The Lunar Lake chips feature 8 cores, split equally between performance and efficient cores. Intel claims that the new system offers up to 40% lower power consumption over the previous generation. The previous generation's Meteor Lake design had L-PE cores, which have been ditched in the Lunar Lake architecture. Moreover, Intel has ditched the concept of hyperthreading as well, meaning that all cores are now single-threaded.

Intel has also significantly boosted the AI processing capabilities for Lunar Lake by introducing a new NPU that is capable of 48 TOPS, as compared to Meteor Lake's 11.5 TOPS. Lunar Lake will also be natively supporting the new H.266 VVC video coding format, which will offer 10% more file size reduction than AV1 while maintaining the same quality, as per Intel.

Moreover, all Lunar Lake laptops will have Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 support, since the connectivity features have been embedded into the chip. All laptops will come with at least two Thunderbolt 4 ports, Hallock told The Verge.

Integrated RAM

Interestingly, Lunar Lake has integrated the RAM onto the system chip, with options for 6 or 32GB of LPDDR5X memory, which means that gamers will not be able to upgrade their RAM in their laptops. However, Intel’s technical marketer Rob Hallock has also revealed that future laptops with upcoming Arrow Lake architecture will allow customers to upgrade their RAM. Laptops with Arrow Lake architecture will be arriving later this year.

As for Lunar Lake laptops, Intel says that they have collaborated with over 20 partners to bring more than 80 new AI PC designs to the market, starting from Q3 2024. Furthermore, all 80 laptop options will be released before the holiday season this year.

Xe2 and Intel Battlemage desktop GPUs

The Xe2 GPU architecture offers 8 Xe-cores with 8 ray-tracing units, which will offer higher gaming performance, better power utilisation and compatibility with games. The new integrated GPU with Lunar Lake is going to offer 50% more gaming performance over Meteor Lake, as per Intel’s claims. The GPU is also capable of offering 67 TOPS of AI performance, in addition to the NPU’s 48 TOPS.

Intel has also confirmed that their Xe2 architecture will be used in their upcoming discrete graphics cards as well, so the Intel Battlemage desktop graphic cards will be based on the Xe2 architecture. Intel also showed a 1-minute demo of the Battlemage GPU where Intel showed how the Lunar Lake’s Xe2 GPU was producing the same 60 FPS results on Wild life Extreme graphics test as the Meteor Lake, but it was consuming fairly less CPU power.