The information comes from Intel directly: Michelle Johnston Holthaus (responsible for the branch Client Computing) indicated to Ian Cutress (former editor-in-chief of Anandtech, turned consultant) that the architecture Lunar Lake was going to (finally) focus on performance per watt, targeting mobile devices. The problem is that Lunar Lake is not for now, as explained Tom’s Hardware.
Too many lakes
Let’s try to summarize. The 13th generation of Core processors (the current one) is called Raptor Lake. It offers high performance, but a fairly average energy efficiency, not to say bad. Conventional chips (like the Core i5) manage to stay in the nails, but as soon as Intel tries to go faster, like – randomly – by raising the frequency to 6 GHz, consumption explodes.
Intel reaches 6 GHz with a special “I don’t like the planet” edition
The 2023 vintage of the Intel range should (according to rumours) be a disappointment: we are currently talking about a Raptor Lake Refreshi.e. an optimization of the 2022 chips, which are themselves fairly minor evolutions of those of 2021 (Alder Lake, the 12th generation). For the moment, nobody knows if Intel will keep the name “13th generation” or consider it the 14th. In the past, society has indeed chosen both paths: Haswell Refresh remained in 4th generation, the Coffee Lake Refresh became the 9th generation.
Meteor Lake, which is officially the 14th generation, does not yet have release dates. Intel is expected to improve fast cores and low-power cores, but there are few details. With this version, the engraving would go to “Intel 4”, which does not precisely indicate the fineness: Intel simply considers that it is equivalent to the 4 nm of other founders.
Avant Lunar Lakethere is yet another release planned: Arrow Lake. If there are no intermediate chips or name changes, it should be 15th generation, again with updated architectures for both types of cores. The engraving would pass in Intel 20A, that is to say approximately 2 nm. The A stands for angstrom, a unit 10x smaller than a nanometer.
Finally, the 16th generation (if all goes well) would be the one we are talking about at the beginning of the article: Lunar Lake. Apart from the fact that Intel would obviously start from scratch to try to optimize the consumption of its chips and that the graphics part would use the Xe2 architecture, there is little known. In the best case, the chips should not land before 2025 or 2026, with an Intel 18A engraving (i.e. 1.8 nm, or equivalent).
(Opening image: Dylan Ashe, CC BY-SA 2.0)