Intel details new Lunar Lake CPUs that will go up against AMD, Qualcomm, and Apple

Intel has faced several challenges in the processor market in recent years. Some of these challenges include:

1. Manufacturing troubles: Intel has struggled with its manufacturing process, falling off the Moore's Law path and facing difficulties in catching up. The company has been working on advancing five nodes in four years to address this issue.

2. Resurgent AMD: Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has been executing well, introducing significant innovations in the CPU market, such as its chiplet architecture and associated packaging. AMD argues that their current products are more performant and offer a better Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) than Intel.

3. Incursion from Qualcomm: Qualcomm has also posed a challenge to Intel, particularly in the mobile chip market.

4. Apple's shift from customer to competitor: Apple has transitioned from using Intel processors in its devices to developing its own Arm-based chips, which has impacted Intel's market share.

These challenges have led to a decline in Intel's dominance in the processor market, with competitors gaining ground and customers having more viable options to choose from.

Lunar Lake's design differs from the previous Meteor Lake architecture in several ways. While both architectures use a chiplet-based design with Intel's Foveros packaging technology, Lunar Lake has a simpler and less weird design with fewer chiplets compared to Meteor Lake.

Meteor Lake's components were spread across four tiles: a compute tile for CPU cores, a TSMC-manufactured graphics tile for GPU rendering, an IO tile for PCI Express and Thunderbolt connectivity, and a SoC tile with additional CPU cores, media encoding and decoding engine, display connectivity, and the NPU. On the other hand, Lunar Lake has two functional tiles: the compute tile, which combines P-cores, E-cores, GPU, NPU, display outputs, and media encoding and decoding engine, and the platform controller tile that handles wired and wireless connectivity, including PCIe, USB, Thunderbolt 4, Wi-Fi 7, and Bluetooth 5.4.

Another significant difference is the integration of RAM into the CPU package for Lunar Lake, which was previously installed separately on the motherboard in Meteor Lake. This change allows for a 40% reduction in power usage and saves motherboard space, which can be utilized for other components or to make systems smaller or allow more room for battery.