It hasn’t even been a year yet since Intel unveiled Meteor Lake, which it called its biggest architectural shift in 40 years, but earlier this week the chip maker revealed the successor processor series—Lunar Lake.
Presented by CEO Pat Gelsinger at COMPUTEX 2024, Lunar Lake is designed to be energy efficient while still being powerful enough to drive next-gen AI PCs and ultra-thin laptops. The chips come with a neutral processing unit that delivers up to 48 Tera Operations Per Second (TOPS), a significant leap over Meteor Lake’s 10 TOPs and more than sufficient to meet the requirements for the Microsoft Copilot+ experience. It also surpasses the Hexagon NPU in the Snapdragon X Elite SoC, which can achieve 45 TOPs. The integrated Xe2 GPU is capable of over 60 GPU TOPs, bringing the overall platform to more than 100 TOPs.

Another major change is the chip design is the on-board memory, available in 16GB or 32GB LPDDR5X configurations. While there is no option to add more physical RAM, the integration reduces latency and system power usage by 40 percent. Eight revamped performance and efficiency cores, along with a so-called “low-power island,” promise up to 60 percent improvement in battery life compared to Meteor Lake.
In terms of connectivity, Lunar Lake offers Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, PCI-Express Gen5, Thunderbolt 4, and USB4. There’s also support for HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort 2.1, and Gigabit Ethernet.
Computers powered by Lunar Lake, expected to be officially marketed as Series 2 Core Ultra processors, are slated for release beginning Q3 2024. Intel anticipates 80 new AI-powered laptops from 20 partner OEMs by the end of the year.