Lunar Lake, a new generation of client processors from Intel that will deliver what the company says is AI performance at a global scale for Microsoft’s newly unveiled Copilot+ laptops, will officially arrive in Q3 2024, just in time for this year’s holiday season, Intel has announced. These CPUs are said to offer 3x the AI performance versus the previous generation, with 40 NPU tera operations per second (TOPS), 60 GPU TOPS, and 100 platform TOPS being some of the figures touted by Intel ahead of their release.
Quotes from executives:
- Michelle Johnston Holthaus, Intel executive vice president and general manager of the Client Computing Group
- “With breakthrough power efficiency, the trusted compatibility of x86 architecture and the industry’s deepest catalog of software enablement across the CPU, GPU and NPU, we will deliver the most competitive joint client hardware and software offering in our history with Lunar Lake and Copilot+.”
- Pavan Davuluri, corporate vice president of Windows + Devices at Microsoft
- “The launch of Lunar Lake will bring meaningful fundamental improvements across security, battery life, and more thanks to our deep co-engineering partnership with Intel.”
- “We are excited to see Lunar Lake come to market with a 40+ TOPS NPU which will deliver Microsoft’s Copilot+ experiences at scale when available.”
Intel on its new CPUs, plus a primer on AI PCs:
Intel’s upcoming client processors (code-named Lunar Lake) will power more than 80 new laptop designs across more than 20 original equipment manufacturers, delivering AI performance at a global scale for Copilot+ PCs. Lunar Lake will get the Copilot+ experiences, like Recall, via an update when available. Building on the success of Intel Core Ultra processors and with the addition of Lunar Lake, Intel will ship more than 40 million AI PC processors this year.
An AI PC has a central processing unit (CPU), a graphic processing unit (GPU) and a neural processing unit (NPU), each with specific AI acceleration capabilities. An NPU is a specialized accelerator that efficiently handles AI and machine learning (ML) tasks right on your PC instead of sending data to be processed in the cloud. The AI PC is increasingly important as the need to automate, streamline and optimize tasks on the PC grows.