Intel's Lunar Lake is here to remind you x86 still has a place in laptops: 'You've never seen x86 power characteristics quite like this'

Intel has dropped some fresh details about its new Lunar Lake mobile CPU architecture, including some performance and power claims, but has stopped short of actually backing that up with any data. Claiming it's not ready to show CPU performance at the moment, all we've got are some promises and the unexpected appearance of Microsoft Teams as a CPU benchmarking platform.

Lunar Lake represents the next generation of Intel processors for thin and light laptops and is its first modern CPU design to be made entirely outside of its own manufacturing facilities. Instead Lunar Lake chips are going to be made entirely at TSMC using the N3B node.

That's no bad thing for the end user. After all, do we really care where the silicon is slapped together if it delivers? 

And Intel is promising that it will, with the new chips also being the first to use the new Battlemage graphics cores. This integrated Xe2 GPU will reportedly deliver 50% higher performance than a competing Meteor Lake Core Ultra 7 165U in terms of 3DMark Time Spy numbers.

It's worth noting that 3DMark benchmarks have historically been very kind to Intel's Arc GPUs, so it's worth noting that actual gaming performance could well be very patchy still. And the Core Ultra 7 165U only had four Xe cores inside it, too, so it wasn't exactly the hero chip in terms of Meteor Lake's graphics performance.

But that GPU is also what's helping the Lunar Lake chip deliver AI performance that's around 40% faster than the new Snapdragon X Elite chips from Qualcomm when it comes to Stable Diffusion.

AI is the battleground for all processor architectures to fight it out on over the next 12 months at least, so that's obviously a point that Intel wants to hammer home. The Xe2 cores have Battlemage's XMX matrix engines built into the iGPU, which delivers 60 TOPs on its own. Then you've got Lunar Lake's own NPU, which is promised to give up 45 TOPS, which means, as a whole, you'll get over 100 TOPs of AI processing grunt out of the box.