At Computex 2024, Intel unveiled the latest Lunar Lake, its next-gen x86 laptop processors aimed at intensifying competition in the ongoing AI race. The processors promise up to 48 TOPS of AI performance, a substantial increase from the 10 TOPS NPU (neural processing unit) in Intel's previous Meteor Lake chips.
Intel claims that the new performance cores (P-cores) and efficient cores (E-cores) provide up to a 40% reduction in system-on-chip power compared to the previous generation. Additionally, as per Intel, a new neural processing unit is up to 4 times faster, leading to enhancements in generative AI. Furthermore, the new Xe2 graphics processing unit cores improve gaming and graphics performance by 1.5 times over the previous generation, Intel says.
In addition to the new Lunar Lake architecture, Intel also introduced the Xeon 6 server processors and the Gaudi 3 AI Accelerator. The Intel Xeon 6 processors, codenamed Sierra Forest, feature efficient cores (E-cores) aimed at enhancing performance and power efficiency for high-density, scale-out workloads. This initial release of the Intel Xeon 6 processor family will soon be followed by processors featuring performance cores (P-cores), codenamed Granite Rapids, which will support more compute-intensive workloads such as AI and computer vision.
On the other hand, the Intel Gaudi architecture is designed to deliver generative AI performance with a price-performance advantage, offering choice and rapid deployment times at a lower total cost of operation.