Intel Shows Off Lunar Lake-Based PC, Unveils Panther Lake for 2025

Intel
(Image credit: Tom's Hardware/Intel)

Intel demonstrated a laptop running a not yet released 15th Generation Core processor codenamed Lunar Lake at its Innovation 2023 event on Tuesday — that's the follow up to Meteor Lake, which will debut on December 14 this year. The machine operated just fine and even managed to generate a Taylor Swift-like song using an artificial intelligence application and its built-in hardware inference accelerators. In addition, Intel said that its codenamed Panther Lake CPU will follow Lunar Lake in 2025.

Pat Gelsinger, chief executive officer of Intel, asked one of his colleagues to demonstrate how Intel's upcoming platforms can accelerate AI inference workloads locally. The host used a system on the stage to generate a Taylor Swift-like song in a matter of seconds. After the laptop passed the test, Gelsinger jokingly mentioned that the notebook was looking ugly, and the host explained that the machine was based on the company's Lunar Lake processor that is only due to release some time in 2024.

Intel's Lunar Lake is set to evolve the multi-chiplet design seen in the upcoming Meteor Lake and Arrow Lake client CPUs. Lunar Lake will use a compute chiplet that will be made using the company's Intel's 18A (1.8nm-class) manufacturing process and will mark the first time this technology is used in a commercial application.

(Image credit: Tom's Hardware/Intel)

Lunar Lake will feature Lion Cove high-performance cores and Skymont energy-efficient cores. While we do not know any specifics about the core count or details of the Lion Cove and Skymont designs, we do know from Intel's comments that these are brand-new microarchitectures set to offer breakthrough performance-per-watt advantages.

At this point, it's challenging to predict any actual performance advantages of the Lunar Lake, Lion Cove, and Skymont designs on Intel 18A process compared to the upcoming Arrow Lake CPU that will be made on the Intel 20A production node.

Even harder is to make guesses about Intel's 2025 part codenamed Panther Lake. Normally, it's reasonable to expect Intel to further improve performance, efficiency, feature-set, and acceleration capabilities of any new CPU compared to its predecessor, and the same gains are likely for Panther Lake — they're just further out. Fabrication of Intel's Panther Lake CPUs should begin in early 2024, with retail availability coming by 2025.

(Image credit: Tom's Hardware/Intel)
Anton Shilov
Freelance News Writer

Anton Shilov is a Freelance News Writer at Tom’s Hardware US. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.

  • bit_user
    Unless Arrow Lake ends up being a Desktop-only model, it's hard for me to see how/why they would pack so many generations into such a short amount of time. By my count, they're packing 3 new CPU generations into not much more than 12 months!
    Meteor Lake (Intel 4) - Q4 2023
    Arrow Lake (Intel 20A) - Q? 2024
    Lunar Lake (Intel 18A) - Q4? 2024
    Then, Panther Lake in 2025? What node is that even going to be on? I don't recall hearing about anything beyond 18A, but it must be an announced node if it's launching in 2025.
    Reply
  • Unolocogringo
    Maybe they have a lot of advanced designs that would not work on the 14+++++++++++++++ node. :??:
    Smaller dies means more cpus per wafer. And higher yields.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    Unolocogringo said:
    Maybe they have a lot of advanced designs that would not work on the 14+++++++++++++++ node. :??:
    Yes, but what's been leaked about Meteor & Arrow Lake doesn't seem terribly impressive.
    https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-meteor-lake-core-ultra-7-1002h-leaked-in-geekbench#xenforo-comments-3819912https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-raptor-lake-refresh-arrow-lake-cpu-performance-projections-leaked
    Unolocogringo said:
    Smaller dies means more cpus per wafer. And higher yields.
    New process nodes also tend to be more expensive, so it's not a pure win.
    Reply
  • kwohlt
    Not to be that guy, but these CPUs have been rebranded. Lunar Lake is not "15th gen". It's 2nd gen.
    Reply
  • dehjomz
    bit_user said:
    Unless Arrow Lake ends up being a Desktop-only model, it's hard for me to see how/why they would pack so many generations into such a short amount of time. By my count, they're packing 3 new CPU generations into not much more than 12 months!
    Meteor Lake (Intel 4) - Q4 2023
    Arrow Lake (Intel 20A) - Q? 2024
    Lunar Lake (Intel 18A) - Q4? 2024
    Then, Panther Lake in 2025? What node is that even going to be on? I don't recall hearing about anything beyond 18A, but it must be an announced node if it's launching in 2025.
    Seems like pat is trying to make a return to the 1990s where processors would come out and be excellent and then be obsolete within 6 months. What a time that was.
    Reply
  • WebDevDeadDrop
    bit_user said:
    Unless Arrow Lake ends up being a Desktop-only model, it's hard for me to see how/why they would pack so many generations into such a short amount of time. By my count, they're packing 3 new CPU generations into not much more than 12 months!
    Meteor Lake (Intel 4) - Q4 2023
    Arrow Lake (Intel 20A) - Q? 2024
    Lunar Lake (Intel 18A) - Q4? 2024
    Then, Panther Lake in 2025? What node is that even going to be on? I don't recall hearing about anything beyond 18A, but it must be an announced node if it's launching in 2025.
    Arrow Lake is Desktop only as far as I know.

    With Intel's move to tiles they seem to be moving to a mobile layout that gets its own name and a desktop layout that gets its own name.

    Seems they are rearranging the tiles and making core optimizations for the different segments now that they can disaggregate tiles and mix and match features because of the smaller designs and the increase in ease of design with newer more powerful design tools coming out. There is even a slide they showed off today bragging that Meteor Lake tiles were AI assisted designs.
    Reply
  • thestryker
    bit_user said:
    Unless Arrow Lake ends up being a Desktop-only model, it's hard for me to see how/why they would pack so many generations into such a short amount of time. By my count, they're packing 3 new CPU generations into not much more than 12 months!
    Meteor Lake (Intel 4) - Q4 2023
    Arrow Lake (Intel 20A) - Q? 2024
    Lunar Lake (Intel 18A) - Q4? 2024
    Then, Panther Lake in 2025? What node is that even going to be on? I don't recall hearing about anything beyond 18A, but it must be an announced node if it's launching in 2025.
    Perhaps what we'll see with ARL/LNL is like what we're getting with RPL-R/MTL where MTL covers most of mobile with RPL-R only handling highest performance SKUs.
    Reply