Please note that this post is tagged as a rumor.
Intel Lunar Lake to feature up to 8 Xe-Cores
Details on the next-gen 9-15W architecture from Intel.
Intel’s upcoming mobile series, codenamed “Lunar Lake”, are getting closer to revealing its exact specifications, thanks to some reliable hardware leakers. Intel has already confirmed that Lunar Lake will target low-power mobile platforms, but has not disclosed much information about its features.
One thing we do know is that Lunar Lake will succeed the Core Ultra “Meteor Lake” series, which will use the Alchemist GPU architecture, also known as Xe-LPG. This is the same architecture that powers Intel’s first discrete Arc gaming graphics cards. However, Lunar Lake will have a more advanced GPU design based on the Xe2-LPG architecture derived from Battlemage, the next-generation graphics. According to Bionic-Squash, Lunar Lake (LNL) will have 64 Xe2 Execution Units (EUs), translating into 8 Xe-Cores. This means that Lunar Lake will have 1024 FP32 units used for graphics calculations.
LNL IGPU gets 64 Xe² EU's
— Bionic_Squash (@SquashBionic) July 31, 2023
In terms of EUs, this GPU configuration is actually lower than the full Raptor Lake mobile chip, which has up to 96 EUs. But Raptor Lake is a high-performance architecture, while Lunar Lake is optimized for low-power consumption and efficiency. It is likely that Lunar Lake will complement the series that will be filled with Arrow Lake series, which should also cover both desktop and mobile segments.
Importantly, Battlemage has a different EU structure than Alchemist. Battlemage uses the same SIMD16 EU configuration as Ponte Vecchio, Intel’s high-end data center GPU. This means that each EU can process 16 operations per clock cycle instead of 8 as in Alchemist. This also means that the number of Xe cores count is halved.
Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake in 2024, Source: Intel
Intel Lunar Lake is not to be expected soon, though. This architecture is to feature Intel’s new 18A node and is now scheduled to be ‘manufacturing-ready’ in the second half of 2024, as confirmed during the recent Q2 23 earnings call by Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger.
Source: Bionic_Squash, Wccftech