Thanks to the integration of ARC Battlemage GPUs, Intel’s new processor architecture is off to a great start.
Intel’s return to the discrete graphics card market may not have been the success the company had hoped for, but it has nonetheless vastly boosted its GPU business.
In fact, all chips with integrated graphics benefit from it, and after an already interesting generation of Meteor Lake (after all, the MSI Claw relies on this chip), Lunar Lake promises to go much further.
Lunar Lake is expected to arrive by the end of 2024
Computex 2024, which will be held in early June in Taipei, Taiwan, will undoubtedly be an opportunity for Intel to present in detail Lunar Lake, this architecture that is expected to be commercialized at the end of the year.
Like those on Geekbench, SiSoftware’s databases are often the occasion for leaks. The same goes for these details about an HP X360 Spectre HP computer. Its reference “14-fh0xxx – 5CD4038WJV (HP 8CDE)” doesn’t say much more, but our colleagues at VideoCardz indicate that the beast is indeed powered by a Lunar Lake CPU.
In this case, it’s an SoC that combines high-performance Lion Cove cores and efficient Skymont cores. More importantly, the graphics part of the chip is powered by Xe2-LPG cores, a low-power version of the ARC Battlemage architecture that will succeed Intel’s ARC Alchemist.
Much less energy-efficient than Meteor Lake
The Lunar Lake SoC integrated into the HP laptop has an “incomplete” chip with only 7 Xe-Cores, while Intel has already hinted at the possibility of placing up to 8 of them. In this way, on the X360 Spectre, the number of compute units is only 56, compared to 112 or 128 on the current Meteor Lake processors.
This difference in size does not prevent HP’s laptop from largely dominating the competing laptops mentioned in the SiSoftware databases (therefore based on Meteor Lake) with 2,108 Mpx/s against, at best, 1,772 Mpx/s. In addition, the HP laptop achieves this performance with a chip clocked at just 1.85 GHz (compared to 2.2 GHz for the competition) and a TDP of 17 watts (compared to 28 watts for the competition).
Given the relative opacity of SiSoftware databases, we’ll be careful not to jump to conclusions. However, Lunar Lake seems to have quite a graphic potential, which could pave the way for frank competition with AMD’s APUs, in the world of laptops of course, but also consoles.