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

NPU performance will be in the same ‘AI PC’ ballpark

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Intel’s next-gen chips for laptops,known as Lunar Lake (Core Ultra 200), won’t just major in power-efficiency, but will also provide a powerful performance for AI workloads in thebest 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 forMicrosoft’s definition of an ‘AI PC’ it should be noted).

However, that’s 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 don’t know how that breaks down, as Intel didn’t elaborate on this. But it’s a safe bet that the majority of the work here is being done by the graphics solution, which isBattlemage(Intel’s 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

Intel’s Lunar Lake CPUs are expected to debut later this year –although volume production likely won’t happen until 2025– and big things are expected of the laptop chips. That’s both in terms of raw performance and also with thevarious tricks hiddenup thesleeve 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 there’s theSnapdragon X Elitethat’s going to debut before Lunar Lake, with laptops carrying this SoC set to arrive in June. We already know that Qualcomm’s chip will offer 45 TOPS from its NPU, which is exactly the same as Lunar Lake.

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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 anARM-based chip is the restrictions on the apps you can use (or at least, how fast software that isn’t written for ARM will run under emulation, with Windows on ARM).

What aboutAMD? AsTom’s Hardware, which spotted Intel’s revelation, informs us, AMD hasn’t put a figure on AI performance with itsnext-gen Strix Point chipsfor 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 it’s 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 don’t yet know exactly how Strix Point will pan out in terms of what grunt the CPU andGPUwill add to that NPU. We’re betting it’ll be a close race all-round, though, and we must remember that AI tasks aren’t everything either – general performance underWindows 11is more important, naturally.

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Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - ‘I Know What You Did Last Supper’ - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).

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