Baichuan Li
Baichuan Li
United Kingdom
2y
Hi All It's nearly October and Intel's Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake offerings will soon hit the market. This is a watershed moment for Intel as its future success hinges on this release. Intel has really thrown the kitchen sink at this generation's chips, after the previous generation stumbled on huge power draw and resulting instability issues. Lunar Lake promises ARM-like efficiency in an x86 package, with many paradigm-shifting changes packed inside the tiny PCB. For starters, Intel has disabled hyperthreading on the chips at a hardware-level. Hyperthreading has been the mainstay of modern chip design since Intel championed it in Xeon and Pentium designs in 2002. It allows a single physical core to process tasks as if it had two cores. This was a good idea when CPUs had one or few cores in order to speed up simultaneous processing. However modern consumer CPUs regularly feature 8-16, and sometimes even 24 cores. As a result, multithreading has become less useful but more as a bottleneck for power-draw. Nevertheless, disabling it has been a bold move by Intel. Another fundamental change with Lunar Lake is the architecture. Lunar Lake builds onto Meteor lake with a brand new architecture that, instead of the previous monolithic design, consists of smaller chiplets that are packed closely with Intel's Foveros technology. This leads to many advantages, for example it allows the E-cores to sit on its own island with its own power rail operating much more independently from the P-cores, achieving even more power efficiency as now you can turn the P-cores off completely when not used. The LPDDR5X RAM is also now integrated into the die, allowing for higher memory bandwidth and lower power consumption. The chiplet design also makes it easier to scale Lunar Lake processors into higher core counts in the future should the need arise. All of the changes in Lunar Lake quickly adds up, and has produced a very power-efficient design indeed. Early results indicate that in single-threaded tasks, Lunar lake achieves over 50% higher performance-per-watt compared to Meteor Lake, and leapfrogs the best offerings from AMD as well. Multithreaded results were more lacklustre, due to the highest SKU only having 8 cores compared to the 12 multithreaded cores from AMD and ARM designs. The Lunar Lake package offerings are rounded out by a competitive NPU (48 TOPS), as well as a much improved Xe2 Battlemage-powered iGPU. Early testing suggests that the Arc 140V iGPU performs faster and more efficiently compared to the Radeon 890M, impressive news considering the 2021 Iris Xe was about 1/3 as capable as an AMD iGPU back then. Of course, as high-stakes daring attempts often go, there are huge concerns at play here. My current biggest concern is capacity and Intel Foundry. Intel's Foundry made a loss of $7bn last year as it seeks to grow in capacity and become a viable option alternative to TSMC. It seems that this isn't mature yet as Intel recently announced all of Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake are to be outsourced to TSMC, in addition to Arrow Lake-S seemingly cancelled. While this isn't an immediate issue, Intel is no longer the cash-making behemoth it used to be and it's a race against time for Intel to get its foundry fully up and running before Intel runs into bigger financial problems and things spiral out of control. As it stands however, it is an exciting time to be an Intel investor, and let's wait and see whether this new architecture and generation gives us the catalyst for the start of a turnaround.
Not investment advice. The author may have financial interests in the mentioned instruments.
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