Intel's new Lunar Lake CPU is simultaneously wonderful, weird and worrisome, but has the makings of an awesome handheld gaming chip

So, Intel has lifted the lid on its radical Lunar Lake mobile CPU and it's an awful lot to absorb. It's new across the board. New CPU cores, new graphics architecture, a new approach to both the internal fabric of the chip and its multi-die construction, a new external foundry node, just new everything. And true to Intel's current mojo in general, Lunar Lake is a fascinating mix of wonderful, weird, worrisome and, well, whatever.

The wonderful bits start with the new E-cores, which Intel says are roughly on par with the full P-cores in today's Raptor Lake desktop CPU for performance per clock. To get the full performance from those new Skymont E-cores, they'll need to be fully integrated into the CPU's high-performance fabric, which isn't the case with this new processor (but will be for future desktop CPUs using Skymont cores).

In Lunar Lake, they're separated off into a so-called low-power island in the name of efficiency and therefore have less cache than they otherwise would and less optimal access to the available high-level cache. But you're still looking at a major step over the E cores in any other Intel CPU.

Indeed, Intel reckons Lunar Lake is designed to get pretty much everything done while running on battery power on those E-cores. The P-cores will rarely, if ever get fired up while on battery.

The P-cores in Lunar Lake, known as Lion Cove, also get a healthy IPC boost. All told, the result is that Intel claims that a Lunar Lake processor with four E-cores and four P-cores outperforms Intel's current Meteor Lake laptop CPU with 10 E-cores and six P-cores.

Put another way, that's eight Lunar Lake threads beating 22 Meteor Lake threads. The thread count gap is partly down to Intel dropping HyperThreading for Lunar Lake's P cores. Impressive, however you look at it.

Another potentially wonderful element is the new Battlemage iGPU, which carries over the eight execution unit count from Meteor Lake, but still increases performance by around 50% thanks to a