Intel to launch Core Ultra Series 2 Lunar Lake processors in early September

Intel announced on Tuesday that it plans to officially launch its next-generation Core Ultra Series 2 ‘Lunar Lake’ processors on September 3, 2024. The new CPUs will be introduced at the IFA trade show, and the launch event will be webcast on Intel’s website.

The launch event will be hosted by Michelle Johnston Holthaus, Intel executive vice president and general manager of the Client Computing Group, and Jim Johnson, senior vice president and general manager of the Client Business Group. They will be joined by PC makers who will introduce their Core Ultra Lunar Lake-based machines.  

This online presentation is expected to cover all innovations that Lunar Lake brings to the table, including its microarchitecture, which is projected to enable very high performance at low power. The speakers will detail the enhancements in power efficiency, core performance, and graphics capabilities, as well as emphasize substantial improvements in AI computing power. 

The formal introduction of Core Ultra ‘Lunar Lake’ processors in September will ensure that PC makers will release their PCs with these CPUs inside ahead of the important holiday season.

Intel’s Lunar Lake packs four high-performance Lion Cove microarchitecture-based performance cores (P-cores), four Skymont microarchitecture-based efficiency cores (E-cores), and an Xe2-based graphics processor. Lunar’s NPU delivers 45+ TOPS of performance for AI workloads, quadrupling that of Meteor Lake’s 11 TOPS and exceeding Microsoft’s 40 NPU TOPS requirements for next-gen AI PCs.  At present, it is difficult to gauge the performance improvements brought by the new Lion Cove and Skymont microarchitectures over the Arrow Lake and Meteor Lake CPUs. However, Intel has set high expectations for its 2024 processors in general.  

Lunar Lake consists of three tiles or chiplets as Intel combined the system-on-chip (SoC) and GPU components into a single tile. The compute tile is manufactured on TSMC’s N3B fabrication process and the platform controller tile, which handles external I/O interfaces, is manufactured using TSMC’s N6 manufacturing technology. The only component on the chip that’s manufactured by Intel is the passive 22FFL Foveros base tile, which serves as the communication hub, enabling interaction between the various tiles and the host system. Intel asserts that the SoC power consumption has been reduced by 40% compared to Meteor Lake.  Intel plans to equip Lunar Lake with on-package LPDDR5-8533 memory.