and it's an awful lot to absorb. It's new across the board. New CPU cores, new graphics architecture, a new approach to both the internal fabric of the chip and its multi-die construction, a new external foundry node, just new everything. And true to Intel's current mojo in general, Lunar Lake is a fascinating mix of wonderful, weird, worrisome and, well, whatever.
Indeed, Intel reckons Lunar Lake is designed to get pretty much everything done while running on battery power on those E-cores. The P-cores will rarely, if ever get fired up while on battery. Alternatively, Lunar Lake can match the gaming performance of Meteor Lake while using roughly 35 to 40% less power. Take it all together and Lunar Lake has the makings of one heck of a handheld gaming PC chip. If anything, it looks even more promising than AMD's new Strix Point, which looks quick but has us worried about power consumption.
As for the weird and worrisome, let's start with manufacturing tech. The compute tile in Lunar Lake is based onSoon after he arrived back at Intel as CEO, Pat Gelsinger set what he claimed was a bold target of. Well, we're pretty much three years in, Lunar Lake won't be on sale for a few months yet and somehow no Intel node's good enough for this chip.
The timing and market positioning of Lunar Lake feels a little irregular, too. The Meteor Lake family of laptop chips really only became available in proper volumes earlier this year, and already Intel is rolling out a totally new laptop chip. It's also a little worrisome that Intel didn't show any detailed performance numbers for the new chip or any indications of clock speeds. For sure, this isn't a product launch, so final specs may not quite be available. But the hard data was pretty thin on the ground.