Look out, Apple – Microsoft could be working with Intel to optimize Lunar Lake CPUs for Windows 11 to take on M3 silicon

Lunar Lake CPU glimpsed in photo, with promising news on optimization

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Intel’s Lunar Lake mobile chipshave been the subject of another leak – there have been a few recently – with a purported photo of one of the laptop chips shared, and some details on how these processors should run really well withWindows 11.

As a quick refresher, Lunar Lake is low-power silicon designed to be highly power-efficient and great for thebest thin-and-light laptops, and these next-gen chips are expected to arrive later this year.

The mentioned photo of a Lunar Lake MX processor (see it below, and add your own salt) comes courtesy of German tech siteIgor’s Lab, and shows that the silicon uses a multi-chiplet configuration with on-board LPDDR5X RAM in the mix.

As previously rumored, the most powerful Lunar Lake CPU will run with four performance cores and four efficiency cores.

While that might sound a bit weak sauce, remember, these are CPUs designed for slim laptops –such as the MacBook-like Samsung Galaxy Book5 Pro– and they’re supposed to be powerhouses, but only relative to their size and power envelope.

Okay, we mentioned Lunar Lake performing well with Windows 11 at the outset, so what’s the deal with that? Igor tells us thatIntel’s mobile CPUs have been developed in conjunction withMicrosoftto be optimized for Windows. So, in short, the hardware and software have been crafted with each other in mind to ensure better overall performance.

Analysis: It’s a kind of Battlemagic

The happy takeaway here for those mulling a Windows 11 laptop with Lunar Lake later in 2024 (or indeed 2025) is that this is another sign that the performance of Intel’s next-gen mobile processors should be even better than expected. And as you may recall, those expectations are already high, with Lunar Lake said to have several high-value cards up its sleeve,for example to even further bolster battery life, or tomake PC games look better.

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Speaking of games, it’s worth noting that Igor also confirms that Battlemage, or 2nd-gen Arc, is used with Lunar Lake’s integrated graphics, and that’s a highly anticipated development for faster frame rates in svelte andportable gaming laptops.

Both Intel and Microsoft have a vested interest in pushing Lunar Lake to be something special, with an eye on outdoingApple’s slim MacBooks which now have M3 silicon in the Air as well as Pro models. A tighter relationship between Intel’s hardware and Microsoft’soperating systemwill surely help to that end.

The otherline of attack against MacBooks for MicrosoftisARM-powered laptops, which will be armed (ahem) with the inbound Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chip, ahighly promising piece of silicon itself– and one that will power Microsoft’s consumer Surface devices for this year, or so we hear.

It’s clear Microsoft is aiming to land some pretty big punches in the land of laptops during 2024, and all these devices will, of course, be AI PCs pushing Copilot harder (and that dedicated Copilot key, which will naturally prove controversial).

ViaTom’s Hardware

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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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