Lunar Lake Revealed: 100+ TOPS of AI Power

As reported by Hothardware, Intel’s CEO, Pat Gelsinger, showcased the next-generation Lunar Lake, designed for low-power platforms, at the Vision 2024 event. He stated that the new generation chips could deliver over 100 TOPS of computational power in artificial intelligence (AI) workloads, with 45 TOPS emanating from the NPU alone.

Previous reports suggested that future iterations of Microsoft’s Copilot AI large model could run locally on PCs equipped with Intel processors, requiring at least an NPU with 40 TOPS of computational power. The current Core Ultra series processors, also known as Meteor Lake, only offer an NPU capability of 10 TOPS, falling short of this benchmark. In contrast, the NPU performance of Lunar Lake represents a significant advancement, with its 45 TOPS fully meeting the requisite standards. Before this, only Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite NPU achieved such a level, similarly providing around 45 TOPS of power.

However, Pat Gelsinger did not elaborate on how the 100+ TOPS of computational power provided by Lunar Lake is distributed, aside from the 45 TOPS by the NPU. The remaining 55+ TOPS could logically be attributed to approximately 55 TOPS from the GPU, with the CPU contributing an additional 5 to 10 TOPS. Gelsinger also confirmed that laptops powered by Lunar Lake are slated for release by Christmas 2024.

The AMD Ryzen 8040 series processors currently on the market, equipped with the Ryzen AI NPU, only deliver 16 TOPS of power. AMD has confirmed to TomsHardware that the upcoming Strix Point, similar to Lunar Lake and based on the XDNA 2 architecture, will see a significant increase in NPU power to levels exceeding 40 TOPS.