With a raft of PC manufacturers announcing Copilot+ PCs this week including Microsoft, HP, Asus, Lenovo, Samsung and Dell, there was one glaring similarity between them all – each of them offered Qualcomm chips.
But before fingers could begin to point at Intel as being confined to second position by Qualcomm, it confirmed this week that its Lunar Lake chips – its first to support all the Copilot+ AI features – will break cover in Q3 2024.
That chip will be introduced in more than 80 new laptops from over 20 hardware partners, says Intel.
Notably, Intel confirmed that it will ship more than 40 million AI PC chips this year. These will include an onboard neural processing unit for generative AI features.
The PCs with the Lunar Lake chips will add the new Copilot+ features, like Recall and Cocreator via a software update.
Lunar Lake, according to Intel, will have more than triple the AI performance of the current Meteor Lake models, supporting over 40 trillion NPU operations per second.
Intel claims that the Lunar Lake processors are capable of 1.4 times faster performance in Stable Diffusion 1.5 compared to the Arm-based Snapdragon X Elite.
Intel noted in a statement that Lunar Lake will also be equipped with over 60 GPU TOPS delivering more than 100 platform TOPS.
As a refresher, it’s worth remembering here that an NPU is a specialised accelerator that handles AI and machine learning tasks on your PC itself instead of sending data to be processed in the cloud.
“The launch of Lunar Lake will bring meaningful fundamental improvements across security, battery life, and more thanks to our deep co-engineering partnership with Intel. We are excited to see Lunar Lake come to market with a 40+ TOPS NPU which will deliver Microsoft’s Copilot+ experiences at scale when available,” said Pavan Davuluri, corporate vice president of Windows + Devices at Microsoft.
