Intel Reveals New Lunar Lake Details At Computex

24 hours ago AMD was in the limelight in announcing the Ryzen 9000 series, the Ryzen AI 300 series, teasing AMD 5th Gen EPYC, etc. Now the tables have turned to Intel with the embargo lifting concerning new details on the Gaudi 3 AI accelerator and upcoming Lunar Lake mobile processors and the launch of the Intel Xeon 6700E (Sierra Forest) E-core server processors. In this article is a look at some of the new disclosures around Lunar Lake.

AI with Lunar Lake was a big focus on the Computex briefings... AI, AI, AI.

Lunar Lake is focused on a 4 E core + 4 P core hybrid design.

Exciting me a lot about Lunar Lake is the Xe2 graphics.

As covered in many Phoronix articles already, Intel driver engineers have been busy working on the Xe2 graphics support within the Intel Xe kernel driver as well as the Mesa OpenGL/Vulkan drivers. The support continues coming together and exciting to see Intel is aiming for up to 50% better performance than the already capable Arc Graphics found with Meteor Lake.

The Lunar Lake NPU support is also already enabled within the upstream Linux kernel IVPU driver.

The 48 TOPS for the Lunar Lake NPU is just under the 50 TOPS reported by AMD for the Ryzen AI 300 series NPU. Intel currently provides better open-source and upstream NPU support compared to AMD that just earlier this year open-sourced their XDNA Linux kernel driver but is not yet upstream.

Intel is claiming up to 40% lower SoC power with Lunar Lake.

During a deep dive into Xe2, the work on power efficiency was covered along with the 2nd gen Xe core, new vector engine, new Xe Matrix Extension Engines, new render slice, and other improvements were covered.

With the Linux graphics driver support still being treated as experimental, it will be interesting to see how the open-source driver support is on launch day.

For both the P and E cores with Lunar Lake, Intel is talking up very nice power efficiency and performance improvements over Meteor Lake and prior.

Apologies for this article being rather brief due to much of my time being spent focusing on benchmarks and in particular the Xeon 6700E Sierra Forest benchmarking embargo that also expires at the same time.

Long story short, it will be interesting to see how the Linux support and performance is for Lunar Lake when these notebook SoCs begin appearing in Q3... I intend to buy a Lunar Lake laptop for Linux testing (unfortunately, typically not receiving review samples of new Intel laptop reference models at launch and thus resorting to buying retail hardware for delivering a plethora of Linux support/performance data) and benchmarking as soon as hardware becomes available, so stay tuned for Lunar Lake Linux testing at Phoronix upon launch. The timing of Lunar Lake laptop availability will also be interesting with the AMD Zen 5 powered Ryzen AI 300 series laptops beginning to ship in July for an interesting summer 2024 Linux laptop landscape and benchmarking battle.