Intel Lunar Lake CPUs Allegedly Delayed to Q4 2024, Originally: Q3 2024

Intel’s Core Ultra 200V “Lunar Lake” processors, central to Team Blue’s “AI PC” marketing campaign, are reportedly delayed until the last quarter of 2024. These chips are expected to deliver over 100 TOPS of inferencing throughput, featuring a 45 TOP NPU unit. The delay, if true, puts Intel at a disadvantage compared to AMD and Qualcomm, whose next-gen notebook designs with advanced NPU units have already begun shipping.

AMD’s Ryzen AI 300 “Strix Point” processors, announced at Computex, offer similar NPU performance. The Ryzen AI 300 series, led by the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 and Ryzen AI 9 365, represents AMD’s first hybrid core processors, combining 4x Zen 5 and 8x Zen 5c cores. The accompanying Radeon 890M iGPU boasts 16 CUs (1,024 shader cores), approaching RTX 3050-level performance. The NPU unit, powered by the XDNA 2 architecture, provides 50 TOPS of AI inferencing throughput.

Lunar Lake gains an advantage by leveraging TSMC’s 3nm (N3B) process, while Strix Point relies on 4nm (N4P). AMD’s RDNA 3.5 integrated graphics, a faster NPU unit, and a common ISA across all cores give it an edge over Intel’s Core Ultra 200 offerings.