Intel Lunar Lake processors with up to 3 times better AI performance than Meteor Lake chips will arrive in the third quarter of 2024.

Intel Lunar Lake CPUs are expected to arrive later this year, as the latest processor from the laptop chip maker. They will succeed the current generation of Meteor Lake chips and are claimed to offer more than three times the AI ​​performance. Earlier this week, Microsoft announced that new Copilot+ computers will arrive in the coming months with AI capabilities, and the next generation of Intel processors will also be updated with support for those features, according to the company.

In an announcement earlier this week, Intel revealed that its Lunar Lake CPUs will arrive in the third quarter of 2024 on more than 80 laptop models from more than 20 OEMs — they will be updated with support for Copilot+ experiences, but the company did not provide any details. The chip maker also says it expects to ship more than 40 million AI PC chips this year.

Intel’s new Lunar Lake processors will reportedly be equipped with new CPU cores, as well as a new Intel Xe2 GPU architecture capable of more than 60 tera operations per second (TOPS) and an improved NPU with support for more than 45 TOPS. Intel says that the next generation of AI computers powered by these processors will be able to run more than 500 machine learning models, with a cumulative expected performance of over 100 TOPS.

When the new Lunar Lake chips arrive in Copilot+ laptops later this year, they’ll compete with devices powered by Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X Elite chips and MacBook models powered by M3 (and possibly M4) chips. Intel has reportedly claimed that Lunar Lake is 1.4x faster than the Snapdragon X Elite in Stable Diffusion 15 workloads. It’s currently unclear which of these processors will offer the best AI performance using their onboard NPUs, but a clearer picture should emerge later this year.

As Lunar Lake CPUs are expected to arrive in laptops, these chips are also expected to arrive with power efficiency improvements — up to 30 percent and 20 percent less power consumed during a Microsoft Teams conference (with AI effects) compared to Ryzen 7 7840U and Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3, respectively.

Intel says the advanced low-power island will offer “revolutionary battery life.” It’s worth noting that the Qualcomm and Apple Arm chips also boast high efficiency — Apple’s MacBook Air models are rated to offer more than 15 hours of use on a single charge, with excellent standby life. We can expect to learn more about Intel’s upcoming processors in the coming months.