Intel Lunar Lake chipsets announced for Copilot+ AI PCs

A day after AMD announced its Ryzen AI 300 series chipsets, Intel itself has announced its next series of AI-powered chipsets. Called ‘Lunar Lake’, the new chipsets will succeed the Intel Core Ultra series ‘Meteor Lake’ processors, which were announced in December last year.

The new Lunar Lake chipsets will feature more power, a higher AI processing count and even a more powerful GPU. Here is all you need to know.

Intel Lunar Lake chipsets: What’s new?

The new chips will power Copilot+ certified PCs. Unsurprisingly, the main focus here will be on-device AI, and for that, the chipsets will offer up to 48 TOPS (trillion operations per second). This is a big boost over the Intel Core Ultra chipsets, which offered 10 TOPS. The boost is possible because of a new NPU (neural processing unit) that Intel plans on using.

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It is currently not known what the processors in the Lunar Lake series will be called. Perhaps, they will be named the ‘Intel Core Ultra Gen-2’, but we will only find out when the chipsets are launched later this year.

The new Lunar Lake chipsets will also feature a new Xe2 built-in GPU, which Intel claimed will offer 80 per cent faster gaming performance compared to Intel Core Ultra-powered machines.

When will Intel Lunar Lake chipsets be launched?

Intel has only announced the new chipsets at Computex 2024, but they won’t be actually available until fall 2024, possibly around December. Until then, if you want an AI PC powered by Intel chipset, it will have to be the Intel Core Ultra chipsets from last year.

Why AMD Ryzen is currently leading the AI chipset race against Intel

AMD announced its Ryzen AI 300 chipsets a day before Intel’s Lunar Lake announcement. However, laptops with AMD’s Ryzen AI 300 chips will be available starting next month, which means those who prefer Intel Lunar Lake chips will have a long waiting time ahead of them.

Moreover, the numbers also have AMD set ahead of Intel’s Lunar Lake chips, with the Ryzen AI 300 chips offering up to 50 TOPS compared to Intel’s 48 TOPS. Of course, performance in real life use-cases may vary, but then again, Ryzen AI 300 laptops will also be available sooner in the market for usage.

One thing that is clear is that the AI laptops race is happening, and Intel and AMD, as well as Qualcomm will be strong competitors in this space moving forward.