Intel Lunar Lake “Core Ultra 200” CPUs To Offer Over 100 AI TOPs & 3x NPU Performance, 40 Million AI CPUs Shipped By 2024 End

Intel has announced that its next-gen Lunar Lake "Core Ultra 200" CPUs will offer over 100 AI TOPs to carry the AI PC momentum forward.

Intel's next-generation Lunar Lake CPUs are going to be a huge deal for Chipzilla as it solidifies its space in the AI PC segment. The company already launched its first-gen NPU in its Core Ultra 100 series codenamed Meteor Lake and the next-generation Arrow Lake & Lunar Lake chips will take things the next level.

During its Vision 2024 event, Intel showcased some more AI performance metrics of its Lunar Lake CPUs which will be branded under the "Core Ultra 200" series (Core Ultra 200V to be precise). The Lunar Lake chips will be an advanced packaged SOC featuring new IPs and new technologies such as the on-packed LPDDR5 memory solution.

The Lunar Lake CPUs will utilize up to 8 cores featuring the Lion Cove P-Cores and Skymont E-Cores on the compute tile and a Battlemage iGPU (Xe2-LPG) with up to 8 Xe cores. The chip will also feature a brand new NPU delivering up to 3x the TOPs of existing chips like Core Ultra 100 "Meteor Lake".

Talking about its Lunar Lake "Core Ultra 200" CPU's AI performance, Intel stated that the chips will offer over 100 TOPs which is a drastic increase from Meteor Lake which offers around 30-35 TOPs. This is a combined figure that includes the CPU, GPU, and NPU.

The NPU being rated at 3x of Meteor Lake is going to be around 45 TOPs which leaves around 50 or so AI TOPs for the Xe2-LPG Battlemage iGPU itself. Battlemage is going to be a huge architectural upgrade over Alchemist and the Alchemist+ iGPUs featured on Meteor Lake and Arrow Lake CPUs so the gains are expected and it is good to see Intel combining the TOPs for all core IPs which is similar to what AMD & Qualcomm have been doing too. Qualcomm has highlighted up to 75 TOPs for its Snapdragon X Elite CPU while Strix Point is going to be somewhere around the same ~100 AI TOPs given its 3x performance increase over Hawk Point thanks to the updated XDNA 2 design.

We recently stated how the emergence of the AI PC segment might have influenced chipmakers to focus on the NPU side of things more than the traditional CPU and GPU enhancements. While the chips are getting faster across the board, there is still the matter of "what could've been" if AI was not a huge thing and less effort was put into making NPUs faster. GPUs are still the way to go when it comes to localized AI processing and while NPU isn't necessarily a bad thing to have, prioritizing resources on AI might mean that we can see fewer upgrades on the CPU and GPU side.

It remains to be seen how the consumer market reacts to the AI PC segment in the coming years but Intel is stating that it expects to ship 40 Million AI CPUs by the end of 2024 and projects 100 million units shipped by 2025.