Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger fired a shot across the bows of his AI PC competitors with his announcement at this week’s Intel Vision event that the company’s forthcoming Lunar Lake CPUs will deliver over 100 TOPS (Tera Operations per Second) of AI workload performance, including 45 TOPS from the NPU (Neural Processing Unit) alone.
100 TOPS is around three times higher than the performance of Intel’s current Intel Core Ultra 100 series processors (codenamed Meteor Lake), which max out at 34 TOPS, and puts Lunar Lake ahead of competing products from AMD and Qualcomm. The 45 TOPS performance for the Lunar Lake NPU also comfortably meets the 40 TOPS NPU performance threshold that Microsoft uses to define an AI PC.
Although the Intel CEO did not provide a specific launch date for Lunar Lake processors, he indicated that they will be available in a new wave of laptops towards the end of this year. He also remains extremely bullish about the market momentum of the AI PC, pointing out that shipments reached 5 million units in the first quarter of 2024 and are expected to hit a total of 40 million during the year.
With AMD promising three times higher generative AI performance for its next-generation “Strix Point” mobile processors and Qualcomm aggressively promoting the 40 TOPS performance of the Hexagon NPU on the Snapdragon X Elite, Intel still faces heavy competition in the emerging AI PC segment despite its impressive Lunar Lake benchmark numbers. Right now, we are just seeing the opening skirmishes in the battle for market leadership.
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