Intel conducted its initial CES 2024 presentation in Las Vegas today, revealing that the Arrow Lake processors for desktop PCs and Lunar Lake for laptops will hit the market in the latter half of 2024. Michelle Johnston Holthaus, Intel’s EVP, and GM of the Client Computing Group, emphasized that the company is in the final stages of development for these processors.
The All New Intel Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake
Arrow Lake, an expansion of the Intel Core Ultra architecture tailored for high-performance desktop gaming, is touted as the inaugural PC gaming processor with AI capabilities. This assertion may lead to a debate with AMD, which recently introduced its own Ryzen chips featuring AI acceleration capabilities.
Intel’s strategy of adapting the general Meteor Lake design from laptops to a, presumably, socketed form for desktop PCs mirrors AMD‘s current practice of repurposing laptop APUs for desktop use. Holthaus also declared the imminent arrival of Lunar Lake for laptops in the current year.
This new chip boasts a revolutionary low-power architecture, substantial IPC improvements, and three times the AI performance on both the GPU and the NPU compared to Meteor Lake. These chips are currently being shipped to Intel’s partners. Holthaus expressed satisfaction with the product’s execution, highlighting that systems are already being shipped to partners and performing well. She described Lunar Lake as a significant advancement in AI performance for thin and light PCs.
During the presentation, Holthaus showcased the Lunar Lake chip, revealing a design with one large die, potentially composed of multiple tiles/chiplets, and two accompanying structures that seem to be on-package DRAM. Analysis of the chip suggests three tiles in the Lunar Lake processor.
This design closely resembles a chip featured in an Intel video that was later retracted earlier in the year. The chip believed to be an unreleased Meteor Lake revision with on-package LPDDR5X, aligns with the Lunar Lake model displayed today. Such a design with on-package memory provides advantages in latency, power efficiency, and space-saving for laptop configurations.
