Intel’s Lunar Lake chip is coming to AI PCs later this year

Intel’s announcement coincides with Microsoft’s Surface and AI event, where Microsoft leaned on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite and Plus chips for Copilot Plus PCs that promise high performance and longer battery life. However, Intel claims its Lunar Lake processors are capable of 1.4 times faster performance in Stable Diffusion 1.5 compared to the Arm-based Snapdragon X Elite.

The Lunar Lake chips will feature a CPU, an integrated Xe2 GPU, and a neural processing unit (NPU). Intel says the Lunar Lake processor offers three times the AI performance compared to its Meteor Lake predecessor. That’s because its NPU is capable of performing over 40 tera operations per second (TOPS) — a far cry from the 10 NPU TOPS offered with the Meteor Lake chips included in a range of AI PCs that are already available.

Intel plans on bringing its Lunar Lake chip to over 80 new laptop designs from over 20 laptop manufacturers, with the goal of shipping 40 million AI PC processors by the end of this year.

We’ll certainly hear more about Lunar Lake and where it stands in the AI PC battleground next to AMD’s Zen 5 and Qualcomm’s Oryon during Computex next month and the Hot Chips conference in August.