Intel unveils Lunar Lake CPUs for AI PCs and Sierra Forest processors for servers

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DragonSlayer101

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In a nutshell: Intel has announced its next-gen consumer laptop and server processors at Computex 2024. Codenamed "Lunar Lake," the new mobile chips are an upgrade over the Meteor Lake SoCs and are expected to power a slew of thin and light AI PCs in the coming months. Meanwhile, "Sierra Forest" CPUs are designed for high-density, scale-out workloads in data centers.

According to Intel, Lunar Lake processors will offer a number of advantages over Meteor Lake, including better power efficiency, a 4x increase in NPU processing and 50 percent faster Arc GPU performance, thanks to the use of the next-gen Battlemage graphics architecture.

The new SoCs will also have on-chip memory for a smaller footprint and faster memory access. The chips are said to offer up to 68 percent IPC gain for E-cores and 16 percent IPC gain for P-Cores.

Lunar Lake is Intel's first CPU lineup to feature built-in NPUs with at least 40 TOPS of AI performance and up to 32GB of LPDDR5X on-package memory, meeting Microsoft's Copilot+ PC specifications. It will come with Lion Cove P-cores, Skymont E-cores, Xe2 GPU architecture, and NPU 4 neural processor architecture for faster AI processing.

According to Team Blue, the new processors will offer a "massive leap in graphics and AI processing power," delivering up to 40 percent lower SoC power and 3x higher AI compute power compared to their predecessors. For now, Intel has only revealed 8-core chips with 4 P-cores and 4 E-cores. It remains to be seen if other core configurations will be available later.

Interestingly, the Lunar Lake tiles will be fabbed not by Intel, but by TSMC using a mix of its N3B and N6 process nodes. Laptops featuring the new chips are expected to hit the market in time for the holiday shopping season.

Alongside Lunar Lake, Intel also announced new Xeon 6 server CPUs from the Sierra Forest family. These processors are said to be based on an open ecosystem with open software and open platforms. They will include both P-Core and E-Core SKUs to address unique workload requirements.

The E-core-only chips are designed specifically for web and microservices, database and analytics, infrastructure and storage, networking, and Edge applications, with Intel claiming up to a 4.2x performance uplift in the aforementioned workloads when compared to 2nd-gen Intel Xeon chips.

The Xeon 6700E lineup will feature a total of 7 SKUs at launch, offering between 64 and 144 cores. They will be clocked at up to 3.2GHz, offer up to 108MB of L3 cache, and have up to 330W max TDP. The new chips will support up to 8-channel DDR5-6400 memory, up to 88 PCIe Gen 5.0 lanes, and 4 UPI 2.0 links rated at 24 GT/s.

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Intel unveils Lunar Lake CPUs for AI PCs and Sierra Forest processors for servers

 
Manufacturers: invents an entirely new SODIMM form factor so soldering on RAM for thinness is no longer an excuse

Intel: hold my beer

Thanks, Apple.
 
68% on E-Cores is a massive IPC Jump. Add 16% from the P-Cores and high end Lunar Lake CPUs will be multithreaded crunching machines. Gaming benchmarks with Lunar Lake against AMD Zen5 x3D will be interesting (productivity benchmarks won't be, though).
 
JuanDegr said:
68% on E-Cores is a massive IPC Jump. Add 16% from the P-Cores and high end Lunar Lake CPUs will be multithreaded crunching machines. Gaming benchmarks with Lunar Lake against AMD Zen5 x3D will be interesting (productivity benchmarks won't be, though).
Click to expand...

FYI, Lunar Lake is for light laptops only. It won't have any chance against desktop Zen5.
 
HardReset said:
FYI, Lunar Lake is for light laptops only. It won't have any chance against desktop Zen5.
Click to expand...
U segment is important, and it sounds like LL could trade blows with H class apu's. But next year Panther Lake delivers the full stack of U/H/HX class apu's all based on refined and improved version of Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake, so 8P + 16E apu's are coming and Panther Lake gets new Cougar Cove P cores and Darkmont E cores on Intel 18A. It should be a another large bump in IPC and performance per watt.
 
JuanDegr said:
68% on E-Cores is a massive IPC Jump. Add 16% from the P-Cores and high end Lunar Lake CPUs will be multithreaded crunching machines. Gaming benchmarks with Lunar Lake against AMD Zen5 x3D will be interesting (productivity benchmarks won't be, though).
Click to expand...
I think that number looks too good to be true and likely an edge case scenario. I mean if you think about it, Intel's previous E-cores were performing somewhere along the lines of a Skylake processor. If the 68% IPC improvement holds true, that would likely means it will exceed the performance of even the P-cores in Alder/ Raptor Lake. And I do think the E-cores have to be buffed up simply because the new P-cores will lose SMT/HT, which means that multicore performance will drop.
 
In 2 years, this windows ai craze (copilot, npu, etc) will end.
hopefully the npu transistor budget will go to more cpu/gpu caches and cores.
 
Watzupken said:
And I do think the E-cores have to be buffed up simply because the new P-cores will lose SMT/HT
Click to expand...
Good point. Ditching good old HT SMT imho is an advantage. It comes with security vulnerabilities (at least with Intels implementation) and can theoretically allow them to maximize ST performance and power consumption (this is, what they apparently want) on a core.

And besides, you don't need Hyperthreading. It is basically a fix to recapture lost efficiency on a core. It unlocks another 15-25% on the virtual thread, but if you have a fully efficient cpu, you simply don't need it. That's why modern ARM designs or Apple Silicon don't use it. Nothing to gain for them there.

We will have to wait for those benchmarks, I guess. New players. New products. Lot's of competition. Very interesting times for the consumer :)
 
Mr Majestyk said:
U segment is important, and it sounds like LL could trade blows with H class apu's. But next year Panther Lake delivers the full stack of U/H/HX class apu's all based on refined and improved version of Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake, so 8P + 16E apu's are coming and Panther Lake gets new Cougar Cove P cores and Darkmont E cores on Intel 18A. It should be a another large bump in IPC and performance per watt.
Click to expand...
It's not that important since Intel will sell well despite offering inferior product.

18A is improves performance per watt against what? Lunar Lake is already using TSMC because Intel can't match TSMC. 18A would probably be somewhere around current TSMC process, it's just Intel but not TSMC so it makes sense to do it.

So far everything looks like Gelsinger as usual. Much talk but not much else.

Watzupken said:
I think that number looks too good to be true and likely an edge case scenario. I mean if you think about it, Intel's previous E-cores were performing somewhere along the lines of a Skylake processor. If the 68% IPC improvement holds true, that would likely means it will exceed the performance of even the P-cores in Alder/ Raptor Lake. And I do think the E-cores have to be buffed up simply because the new P-cores will lose SMT/HT, which means that multicore performance will drop.
Click to expand...
Future E-cores will support AVX-512, 68% easily comes from there.
 
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