The big picture: Laptops powered by Intel's Lunar Lake CPUs are expected to hit the market later this year, but volumes are only likely to ramp up in 2025. A series of recent leaks have revealed some key details about the next-gen chips, and now the first Lunar Lake CPU has seemingly been identified within Intel's latest firmware drivers.
According to a frequent leaker who just goes by Michael on X, the unannounced Lunar Lake-M CPU is the Core Ultra 234V. The listing indicates the chip has an 8-core design, including four "Lion Cove" performance and four "Skymont" efficiency cores. Intel is reportedly doing away with hyper-threading, starting with the Arrow Lake lineup, so the Lunar Lake chip only has eight threads instead of 12 or 16.
The leaked chip had a 2.10 GHz base clock with a 3.10 GHz boost, both slightly slower than expected, likely because we're dealing with an engineering sample and not the retail SKU. The leak also suggests the upcoming chip has an integrated Battlemage Xe2 iGPU, possibly with 64 EUs from 8 Xe-cores.
XE_LUNARLAKE 64a0:0004 dgfx:0 gfx:Xe2_LPG (20.04) media:Xe2_LPM (20.00)https://t.co/tJwXhJFi3b
– Michael (@miktdt) April 4, 2024
Previous speculation indicated that Lunar Lake could come with on-package LPDDR5x memory and offer up to 3x faster NPU performance when compared to Meteor Lake. Furthermore, scuttlebutt suggested that the CPU tile in Lunar Lake chips could be based on Intel's 20A process node, while the GPU might be a 3nm tile from TSMC. However, these reports are unverified and should be taken with a pinch of salt.
Michael's leak comes just days after Samsung's next-gen Galaxy Book 5 Pro laptop, powered by an 8-core Lunar Lake CPU, showed up within the SiSoftware Sandra database. The chip's base frequency was listed at just 1.6GHz, with a boost clock of 2.8GHz. The Lunar Lake-powered Galaxy Book 5 is expected to be the successor to Samsung's existing Galaxy Book 4-series laptops, which run on Arrow Lake processors.
Intel Core Ultra 5 234V "Lunar Lake" CPU revealed in latest firmware
