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Intel has revealed information about its upcoming Core Ultra Lunar Lake platform for laptops at the Vision 2024 event. The company’s new processors will break the 100 TOPS or Tera Operations per Second AI performance barrier. The Lunar Lake platform will rival Qualcomm’s upcoming Snapdragon X Elite CPU that will offer 75 TOPS total across the chip.
Intel Lunar Lake processor meets the requirement for “AI PCs”
Intel’s Lunar Lake is a flagship SOC for next-gen AI PCs. It will have more than 100 TOPS of the total package to handle AI tasks, with a dedicated 45 TOPS NPU performance. It meets the 45 TOPS NPU performance requirement for AI PCs set by Microsoft. That means that laptops powered by this SoC will be able to run Microsoft’s AI assistant Copilot locally.
As Tom’s Hardware reports, running Copilot locally on a PC requires at least 40 TOPS of NPU performance. So with a peak 45 TOPS AI performance, the Intel Lunar Lake platform clearly meets the demand. So far, it has only been achieved by Qualcomm’s upcoming Snapdragon X Elite chip with its 45 TOPS performance. However, when it comes to the combined performance, the Snapdragon platform lags behind Lunar Lake with its 75 TOPS performance.
The Lunar Lake platform offers 3x the AI performance than the Meteor Lake chips
The Intel Lunar Lake platform boasts around three times more AI power than the existing Meteor Lake processors. The Meteor Lake chips only offer 10 TOPS of performance from the NPU or Neural Processing Unit. It is far lower than the bar for next-gen AI PCs. The Meteor Lake platform tops out at 34 TOPS total performance package, which comes combined from CPU, GPU, and NPU.
AMD is also quite far behind the Lunar Lake chips as its Ryzen 8040-series mobile platform only offers 16 TOPS from NPU. Overall, you get up to 39 TOPS from the whole package. However, the company is working towards boosting the AI performance of its mobile chips to meet the AI PC bar. AMD’s next-gen Strix Point mobile CPUs are said to flaunt 3x AI performance as the new XDNA 2 NPU.
Intel is planning to ship 40 million AI PCs this year
At the Vision 2024 event, Intel revealed that it has already shipped five million AI PCs to date. The company is planning to ship 40 million AI PCs by the end of this year. The brand’s big goal is to ship 100 million AI PC chips by the end of next year. That said, the AI PC race will be tight between all three Intel, Qualcomm, and AMD this year.
