Next-gen Intel Core Ultra chips with boosted GPU and NPU are coming in September

Enlarge / Intel’s Lunar Lake Core Ultra CPUs will be announced in September. (credit: Intel)

Intel announced today that it plans to launch its next-generation Core Ultra laptop chips on September 3, just ahead of this year’s IFA conference in Berlin.

This announcement-of-an-announcement offers few specifics on what the next-gen chips will be like beyond promising “breakthrough x86 power efficiency, exceptional core performance, massive leaps in graphics performance and… unmatched AI computing power.” But we do already know a few things about the next-generation CPUs, codenamed Lunar Lake.

We know that, like current-generation Meteor Lake chips, Lunar Lake will combine multiple silicon “tiles” into one large die thanks to Intel’s Foveros packaging technology. We know that Intel will use a mix of up to four E-cores and four P-cores in the CPU, a step down in core count from what was available in Meteor Lake. We know Lunar Lake includes a next-generation Arc GPU based on the “Battlemage” architecture that promises up to 1.5 times better performance than the current Arc-integrated GPU. We know that at least some models are shifting to RAM that’s soldered to the CPU package, similar to how Apple packages RAM in its M-series processors. And we know that Lunar Lake includes a boosted neural processing unit (NPU) for local generative AI processing, Intel’s first chip fast enough to qualify for Microsoft’s Copilot+ label.