In the last few years, apart from the data centre and AI race, Intel seems to be falling behind in the thin and light premium laptop market, which is ruled by Apple Sillion, Qualcomm, and even AMD’s recent launch of Zen Strix Point CPU, which also made headlines for using an ARM chipset.
Intel is not sitting ducks. This time, the company has decided to hit hard with what they are known for as the ‘x86’ platform on its Lunar Lake processors, which not only competes with ARM head-to-head but also provides compatibility of the x86 platform, which is a huge pro of this platform compared to ARM.
“x86 VS ARM discussion is done,” said Manini Sharma, product marketing manager at Intel, while explaining how Lunar Lake CPUs are on par or even better in some benchmarks compared to Qualcomm’s ARM chipsets.
A few months back, Qualcomm announced its Snapdragon X Elite chips for laptops. While specific sales figures for these laptops are not yet available, Copilot+ AI PCs (which include X Elite-powered devices) reportedly accounted for 20% of global PC sales during their launch period.
This is because when Microsoft announced its Copilot+ AI PCs, the requirements seemed to be actively showing love for Qualcomm processors, more than Intel and AMD for its AI PCs, as the capabilities of the current generation of both companies were not even close to what Qualcomm was offering.
Qualcomm is aiming for ambitious growth, targeting a 50% market share in the PC market by 2029.
But now, with Intel’s Lunar Lake making the move, it seems like Intel will usher in the era of AI PCs with Microsoft.
What’s so Good About Lunar Lake?
Intel’s CPU and NPU plans are still seemingly strong, along with a focus on edge use cases and on-device AI. Since Intel is currently the majority holder of the laptop industry, with the future of AI racing towards smaller models, it is possible that Intel might rise in a year or two as the leader, spearheading the AI PC game.
Intel had revealed earlier that starting from the third quarter of 2024, its highly anticipated client processors, codenamed Lunar Lake, are slated to power over 80 fresh laptop designs across more than 20 OEMs.
Lunar Lake is boasting over three times the AI performance of its predecessors. With an impressive 40+ NPU TOPS, Intel’s next-gen processors are poised to deliver the capabilities required for the upcoming Copilot+ experiences.
Moreover, Lunar Lake features over 60 GPU TOPS, amounting to more than 100 platform TOPS in total. It is the first product from Intel that comes with integrated memory like Apple Silicon for faster and more efficient data transfer.
At the launch of Lunar Lake processors, Intel’s senior vice president and general manager, Jim Johnson, revealed that Lunar Lake has the fastest on-board GPU, but when we talk about the AI part, it 120 TOPS (trillion operations per second) of total AI performance across the CPU, GPU, and NPU with double of AI throughput compared to last generation.
Intel anticipates shipping 40 million AI PCs in 2024, featuring over 230 designs spanning from ultra-thin PCs to handheld gaming devices. There are no PCs without Intel – that’s for sure.
AI + Efficiency, x86 is a Bonus
“Before you can even experience performance, you need your application to just run, and there is nothing more frustrating than loading your app and it not working at all. With Lunar Lake, you don’t need a website to check if your favourite app will run, and we have brought the greatest strength of PC (compatibility) with Lunar Lake,” said Jim Johnson, suggesting that x86 offers much better compatibility compared to ARM processors.
Efficiency is a key part here as Intel is betting on their E cores (efficiency cores) like never before and claiming that they will take care of most of your workloads without using available P cores.
To showcase Lunar Lake’s AI capabilities, Intel made an extension for VLC which allows users to find objects from the entire video, running locally. It can also be used to find specific videos from a very large library of videos.
Intel went one step further and showcased how these chipsets can transform verbal descriptions into visual scenes for tabletop role-playing games. It uses speech recognition, language processing, and image generation, to create immersive visual experiences based on a game master’s narration.
Furthermore, Intel also launched a second iteration of AI Playground, a tool which lets you use LLMs locally of your choice, including text-to-image models, to allow normal users a taste of what AI feels like, which is a huge win for the AI PC market.
AI Developers Might Be a Little Disappointed
Out of all the features and efficiency talks, there’s one thing that might disappoint every AI developer, and that is RAM limitation. As mentioned earlier, RAM is now an integral part of the processor, and you can not upgrade after purchasing.
The issue is the top notch variant of Lunar Lake only comes with 32 Gigabytes of RAM and can not be upgraded or increased at the time of purchase. So running a model with more than 20B parameters will be impossible on this.
A Reddit user mentioned that this laptop is meant for normal users, not AI developers. “Despite what you may think, the number of people running LLMs or Flux locally who don’t actually require it for their workload are very small compared to the total install base of Windows,” suggesting the product was targeted to the mass user base but not the niche of AI developers.
But Intel’s Lunar Lake seems to be hitting a decent chunk of the AI PC market with its focus on consumers for now, and not the developers, which might change with the launch of Arrow Lake.
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