Intel says Lunar Lake laptops will be AI powerhouses that could outgun the Snapdragon X Elite CPU

Date:
Wed, 10 Apr 2024 14:26:16 +0000

Description:
Theres a battle of the hype going on, with Intels Lunar Lake CPUs facing off against Qualcomms ARM-based chip.

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Intels next-gen chips for laptops, known as Lunar Lake (Core Ultra 200) ,
wont just major in power-efficiency, but will also provide a powerful performance for AI workloads in the best ultrabooks .

We could have guessed this was the case as Intel was always going to advance considerably on the AI processing that current-gen Meteor Lake is capable of but at the Vision 2024 event, Intel gave us exact figures for Lunar Lakes AI capabilities (measured in TOPS, or trillions of operations per second).

To put things in perspective, Meteor Lake sports an NPU capable of 10 TOPS, but Lunar Lake will treble that to 45 TOPS (exactly the threshold for Microsofts definition of an AI PC it should be noted).

However, thats not the full story, as Lunar Lake will be capable of over 100 TOPS when the AI processing power of the CPU and integrated GPU are taken
into account alongside the NPU accelerating things.

As regards the additional 55 TOPs which comes from the CPU and GPU, we dont know how that breaks down, as Intel didnt elaborate on this. But its a safe bet that the majority of the work here is being done by the graphics
solution, which is Battlemage (Intels next-gen series of GPUs, our first sighting of which could well be in Lunar Lake). Analysis: Next-gen AI performance will be a close-fought battle

Intels Lunar Lake CPUs are expected to debut later this year although volume production likely wont happen until 2025 and big things are expected of the laptop chips. Thats both in terms of raw performance and also with the
various tricks hidden up the sleeve of this silicon plus this talk of 100+ TOPs will only inflame matters further. But how does that figure compare to the rival notebook silicon on the horizon?

Well, notably theres the Snapdragon X Elite thats going to debut before Lunar Lake, with laptops carrying this SoC set to arrive in June. We already know that Qualcomms chip will offer 45 TOPS from its NPU, which is exactly the
same as Lunar Lake.

However, it should be noted that overall including the CPU plus GPU, as well as NPU the Snapdragon SoC will reach 75 TOPS, which is considerably lower than the mentioned 100 TOPS for Lunar Lake. And the other downside of an ARM-based chip is the restrictions on the apps you can use (or at least, how fast software that isnt written for ARM will run under emulation, with
Windows on ARM).

What about AMD? As Toms Hardware , which spotted Intels revelation, informs us, AMD hasnt put a figure on AI performance with its next-gen Strix Point chips for laptops. However, Team Red did say that Strix Point with a
next-gen XDNA 2 NPU will offer up to three times the generative AI performance of current silicon, which is 16 TOPS. So, that puts the NPU for Strix Point at around 48 TOPS, just a hair faster than Intel and Qualcomm in theory but its not much of a difference.

All of these NPUs will be in the same ballpark, but in overall AI
performance, Intel looks to have the better of Qualcomm and we dont yet know exactly how Strix Point will pan out in terms of what grunt the CPU and GPU will add to that NPU. Were betting itll be a close race all-round, though,
and we must remember that AI tasks arent everything either general performance under Windows 11 is more important, naturally. You might also
like Microsoft could be working with Intel to optimize Lunar Lake CPUs for Windows 11 We've chosen all the best student laptops These are the best laptops: top portable picks for all budgets



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Link to news story: https://www.techradar.com/computing/cpu/intel-says-lunar-lake-laptops-will-be- ai-powerhouses-that-could-outgun-the-snapdragon-x-elite-cpu


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