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Given recent manufacturing woes, a resurgent AMD, Qualcomm’s incursion, and Apple’s shift from customer to competitor, it’s been a tough few years for Intel processors. PC buyers have more viable options than they’ve had in many years, and in many ways the company’s Meteor Lake architecture was more interesting as a technical achievement than as an upgrade to previous-generation Raptor Lake processors.

But even with all that in mind, Intel still supplies the vast majority of PC processors — nearly four-fifths of all PC processors sold are Intel, according to recent estimates from analysts at Canalys. The company still casts a long shadow, and what it does still helps set the pace for the rest of the industry.

Enter the next generation of CPU architecture codenamed Lunar Lake. We’ve known about Lunar Lake for a while — Intel reminded everyone it was coming when Qualcomm improved it during Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC reveal — but this month at Computex the company is going into more detail ahead of availability sometime in Q3 2024.

Lunar Lake will be Intel’s first Neural Processing Unit (NPU) processor to meet the requirements of the Microsoft Copilot+ PC. But looking beyond the endless stream of AI news, it also includes upgraded architectures for its P-cores and E-cores, a next-gen GPU architecture, and some packaging changes that both build on and undo many of the dramatic changes made by Meteor Lake intel.

Intel had no more information to share about Arrow Lake, the architecture that will first bring Meteor Lake’s big changes to socketed desktop motherboards. But Intel says Arrow Lake is still on track for a Q4 2024 release and could be announced at Intel’s annual innovation event in late September.

Meteor Lake Building

Lunar Lake shares a few things in common with Meteor Lake, including a chiplet-based design that combines multiple silicon dies into one large one with Intel’s Foveros packaging technology. But in some ways Lunar Lake is simpler and less quirky than Meteor Lake, with fewer chips and a more conventional design.

Meteor Lake’s components were spread across four boards: a compute board that was primarily for the CPU cores, a TSMC-made graphics board for the GPU rendering hardware, an IO board for handling things like PCI Express and Thunderbolt connectivity, and a grab bag ” SoC” board with several additional CPU cores, media encoding and decoding engine, display connectivity and NPU.

The Lunar Lake only has two functional tiles plus a small “filler tile” that seems to exist solely so that the Lunar Lake’s silicone mold can be a perfect rectangle once everything is packed together. The PC board combines all the P-cores and E-cores of the CPU, the GPU, the NPU, the display outputs, and the media encoding and decoding mechanism. And the platform controller board manages wired and wireless connectivity, including PCIe and USB, Thunderbolt 4 and Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4.

This is essentially the same split that Intel has used for laptop chips for years and years: one die for the chipset and one die for the CPU, GPU and everything else. It’s just that now these two chips are part of the same silicon die, rather than separate dies on the same processor package. In retrospect, it seems that some of the most notable deviations in Meteor Lake’s design—the separation of GPU-related functions between different chips, the presence of additional CPU cores inside the SoC chip—were things Intel had to do in order to bypassed the fact that another company actually makes most of the GPUs. Given the opportunity, Intel has gone back to a more recognizable set of components.

Another big packaging change is that Intel has integrated the RAM into the processor package for Lunar Lake instead of installing it separately on the motherboard. Intel says this uses 40 percent less power because it shortens the distance the data has to travel. It also saves space on the motherboard that can be used either for other components to make systems smaller or make more room for the battery. Apple also uses on-board memory for its M-series chips.

Intel says Lunar Lake chips can include up to 32GB of LPDDR5x memory. The downside is that this built-in memory precludes the use of individual compression memory modules, which combine many of the advantages of traditional upgradeable DIMMs and soldered laptop memory.