Intel demonstrated a laptop running a not yet released 15th Generation Core processor codenamed Lunar Lake at its Innovation 2023 event on Tuesday — that’s the follow up to Meteor Lake, which will debut on December 14 this year. The machine operated just fine and even managed to generate a Taylor Swift-like song using an artificial intelligence application and its built-in hardware inference accelerators. In addition, Intel said that its codenamed Panther Lake CPU will follow Lunar Lake in 2025.
Pat Gelsinger, chief executive officer of Intel, asked one of his colleagues to demonstrate how Intel’s upcoming platforms can accelerate AI inference workloads locally. The host used a system on the stage to generate a Taylor Swift-like song in a matter of seconds. After the laptop passed the test, Gelsinger jokingly mentioned that the notebook was looking ugly, and the host explained that the machine was based on the company’s Lunar Lake processor that is only due to release some time in 2024.
Intel’s Lunar Lake is set to evolve the multi-chiplet design seen in the upcoming Meteor Lake and Arrow Lake client CPUs. Lunar Lake will use a compute chiplet that will be made using the company’s Intel’s 18A (1.8nm-class) manufacturing process and will mark the first time this technology is used in a commercial application.
Lunar Lake will feature Lion Cove high-performance cores and Skymont energy-efficient cores. While we do not know any specifics about the core count or details of the Lion Cove and Skymont designs, we do know from Intel’s comments that these are brand-new microarchitectures set to offer breakthrough performance-per-watt advantages.
At this point, it’s challenging to predict any actual performance advantages of the Lunar Lake, Lion Cove, and Skymont designs on Intel 18A process compared to the upcoming Arrow Lake CPU that will be made on the Intel 20A production node.
Even harder is to make guesses about Intel’s 2025 part codenamed Panther Lake. Normally, it’s reasonable to expect Intel to further improve performance, efficiency, feature-set, and acceleration capabilities of any new CPU compared to its predecessor, and the same gains are likely for Panther Lake — they’re just further out. Fabrication of Intel’s Panther Lake CPUs should begin in early 2024, with retail availability coming by 2025.