As part of the final segment of Intel’s "Intel Client Open House Keynote" at CES this afternoon, Intel EVP and GM of the Client Computing Group, Michelle Johnston Holthaus, also offered a brief update on Intel’s client chips in the work for the second half of the year. While no demos were run during the relatively short 45 minute keynote, Holthaus did reiterate that both Arrow Lake for desktops and Lunar Lake for mobile were making good progress and were expected to launch later this year.

But in lieu of black box demos we got something more surprising instead: our first look at a finished Lunar Lake chip.

Briefly holding the chip out for viewers to see – and holding the press away lest they get too close – Holthaus pulled out a finished Lunar Lake chip.

While details on Lunar Lake still remain very slim – Intel still hasn’t even confirmed what process nodes it’s using – the company has continually been reiterating that they intend to get it out the door in 2024. And having silicon to show off (and shipping to partners, we’re told) is a very effective way to demonstrate Intel’s ongoing progress.

Of note, seeing the chip in person confirms something we’ve all but been expecting from Intel for a few years now: CPUs with on-package memory. The demo chip has two DRAM packages on one of the edges of the chip (presumably LPDDR5X), making this the first time that Intel has placed regular DRAM on a Core chip package. On-package memory is of particular interest to thin & light laptop vendors, as it allows for further space savings and cuts down on the number of critical traces that need to be routed from the CPU and along the motherboard. The technique is most notably (though far from exclusively) used with Apple’s M series of SoCs.

Beyond showing off the physical chip, Holthaus also briefly talked about expected performance and architecture. Lunar Lake is slated to offer “significant” IPC improvements for the CPU core. Meanwhile the GPU and NPU will each offer three-times the AI performance. How Intel will be achieving this remains unclear, but at least on the GPU side, we know that they’ve yet to offer XMX matrix cores within an integrated GPU.

No doubt this is far from the last time we’ll hear about Lunar Lake ahead of its launch. But for now, it’s a bit of a look into the future while Intel continues to ramp production on Meteor Lake for what is now the latest generation of laptops and other mobile devices.

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  • lmcd - Monday, January 15, 2024 - link

    Arrow is 3nm though, we already know that.

    20A might not be library complete but if it has sufficient low power libraries, it's ahead of where 4nm shipped for Meteor Lake.
  • ceisserer - Tuesday, January 9, 2024 - link

    finally - I've been waiting for years to get on-chip memory connected via a broad interface with the APU. i thought AMD would provide this because of their expertise in the console market where they already have exactly this, but it was Apple who brought it into the "PC" market. Unfortunate for me, because as a linux user I don't want to buy their closed-down hardware.

    So with lunar lake I now finally have something to wait for replaxing my amd cezanne based laptop.
  • Diogene7 - Thursday, January 18, 2024 - link

    I wish that R&D would be even more advanced and that they would be using Non Volatile Memory (NVM) like SOT-MRAM because in theory, it could bring new innovation like always-on functionalities and lower latency to significantly improve responsiveness…
  • Cd7890 - Sunday, January 14, 2024 - link

    lest, not least

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