Intel details TSMC-made Lunar Lake processor for AI PCs

News | June 4, 2024

By Peter Clarke

AI MPUs/MCUs Artificial Intelligence

Intel has provided details of its Lunar Lake processor for AI-enabled PCs with chiplet tiles made by TSMC and said it is due to ship in 3Q24.

The basic information was provided by Pat Gelsinger, CEO of Intel, during keynote speech at Computex in Taipei, Taiwan, which also touched on Xeon 6 processors for the data center and Gaudi 2 and Gaudi 3 AI processors for the data center.

Gelsinger is the third of three leading CEOs to keynote Computex this year. He follows on from Jensen Huang of Nvidia and Lisa Su of AMD (see Nvidia points to Rubin superchip successor to Blackwell and AMD announces AI roadmap through 2026).

Lunar Lake is a chiplet-based processor made for Intel by foundry TSMC using its N6 and N3B manufacturing processes, nominally at 6nm and 3nm respectively. The component is then assembled by Intel using its Foveros 3D packaging technology. It is reported that the compute chiplet is made using N3B and housekeeping controller tile is made using N6.

In his keynote Gelsinger did not discuss the manufacturing of Lunar Lake but said that it would provide 3x AI inference performance 40 percent lower power consumption compared with the previous generation of PC processor from Intel, Meteor Lake.

Meteor Lake, which started shipping in December 2023 was the first PC processor from Intel to make use of foundry supply and used a combination of the Intel 4 process and TSMC’s N6 and N5. Intel had been expected make Lunar Lake using its 18A process.

Gelsinger is quoted saying in a post-keynote question-and-answer session: “Put simply, Lunar Lake picked TSMC as the right technology at that point in time. That’s why we ended up using more of it. And obviously, with the results I talked about today, it was a good choice.”

Lunar Lake includes a new performance core called Lion Cove and new efficiency core called Skymont. Also disclosed was Intel’s NPU 4.0 neural processor which delivers up to 48TOPS. Intel claims a total capability of 120 AI TOPS across the component.

Gelsinger said that while others were entering the AI-PC market Intel has been shipping for some time and delivered more AI PC processors in 1Q24 than all competitors in aggregate. That implies that Intel has better than 50 percent marketshare.