Intel launches Lunar Lake
Intel put out some solid performance and power efficiency numbers for its new Intel Core Ultra 200V series processors (formerly known as Lunar Lake) at its launch event earlier this week, showing that there is still life in the x86 architecture yet.
The company’s claims of up to twenty hours of battery life put the processor on a par with the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite and AMD Ryzen AI platforms, and its support for 120 total platform TOPS (tera operations per second) across CPU (central processing unit), GPU (graphic processing unit) and NPU (neural processing unit) give it the AI PC performance crown, at least for now.
Even though Intel is touting 80 consumer AI PC design wins from twenty manufacturing partners, the company is highly unlikely to reassert its former dominance of the notebook market with the Intel Core Ultra 200V series. Now that PC OEMs have a choice of three comparable platforms from Intel, Qualcomm, and AMD, they are sure to spread the love around rather place their all their eggs in one biscuit. Indeed, companies like Lenovo, Asus, and Acer have already unveiled new AI PC laptop lines featuring processors from all three companies.
While the launch of the Intel Core Ultra 200V series should help Intel to arrest its slide on the product design side, the fact that most of the key components of the processor are being manufactured by TSMC shows how far it is behind with its foundry operations.
The announcement by Ben Sell, VP of Technology Development, on September 4 that the company is shifting resources from Intel 20A to the more advanced Intel 18A process earlier than expected was no doubt designed to allay these concerns. However, whether the reasons Sell gives for this decision are sufficient to inspire confidence that Intel is on track to meet its goal of becoming the world’s second largest foundry by 2030 is seriously open to question. Surely, he could do better than: “we have seen positive response across our ecosystem and are encouraged by what we’re seeing from Intel 18A in the fab.”
