Intel’s Lunar Lake CPUs may be coming out sooner than you think — and that’s great news

A new report may have revealed the launch date of the Intel Lunar Lake chips for both desktops and laptops, which is expected to be between September 17 and 24, 2024. If this report is to be believed, it puts the launch just before the Intel Innovation event, which lands on September 24 and 25.

The report, which comes from Benchlife (reported on by Kitguru), also asserts that the Core Ultra 200K ‘Arrow Lake-S’ will be available about a month later, along with the release of the first Z890 motherboards. However, the Core Ultra 200 non-K chips should launch in early 2025 with the B860 and H810 motherboards, most likely to be revealed during CES 2025.

This report coincides with the official news from Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger’s Computex 2024 keynote that the Lunar Lake series would be released sometime in late 2024. This means we’ll get AI PCs outfitted with the new chips right around the holiday season.

The competition is heating up 

What makes these Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake launches especially interesting is that they nearly match the launches of AMD’s Strix Point and Ryzen 9000 CPUs and Nvidia’s next-gen GeForce graphics cards. We’ll be seeing some truly high-profile releases this year, which perfectly meshes with the advent of AI PCs.

Of course, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite chips have already started launching with AI PCs, adding another competitor to the mix. Now that we have so many players coming in, I look forward to seeing them compete for market share. It’s honestly about time there was a major shakeup, and the results should mean that these tech giants continue to innovate and deliver the best products they can to us.

It already seems that Intel is confident in its imminent victory in the CPU market over Qualcomm, as it’s stated several times that the Lunar Lake will surpass Snapdragon. It claims it’ll deliver 1.4x faster AI performance than the Snapdragon X Elite while using 20% less power. It also points out that the NPU – Neural Processing Unit for AI acceleration – will hit 45 TOPS (trillions of operations per second), and the GPU will provide 60 TOPS.

While my money is on Qualcomm, as so many manufacturers have pivoted to outfitting their AI PCs with Snapdragon chips, and it’s the most promising in balancing performance with battery life, I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled to witness which one comes out on top in the end.

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