Intel Lunar Lake-MX Leak: Lion Cove P-Core μArchitecture, TSMC N3B Process, iGPU Based on Battlemage Xe2-LPG (8 Cores) & Faster than Apple’s M2 SoC

A huge leak from official Intel slides has revealed a lot of information about the upcoming Lunar Lake architecture. Lunar Lake is not the successor to Arrow Lake or even Meteor Lake. Rather, it is a mobile-only generation said to replace the forthcoming low-power Meteor Lake-U CPUs.

To give some perspective about this leak, the original tipster was YuuKi_AnS, who quickly took down her posts. A backup of these leaked slides is available at Anandtech by user Geddagod.

Lunar Lake-MX: Lion Cove & Skymont Cores Plus Up to 8 Xe2 Battlemage Cores

The official leaked slide confirms the use of next-gen Lion Cove P-Cores and Skymont E-Cores for Lunar Lake. Likewise, Lunar Lake will pack the next-gen NPU 4.0 alongside an iGPU based on Xe2-LPG (Battlemage). The architecture offers the use of fast-soldered LPDDR5x-8533 memory and support for WiFi 7 technology and Bluetooth 5.4.

The MX suffix indicates the presence of on-die memory, termed as Memory on Package (MoP). Intel currently targets dual-channel LPDDR5x-8533 MoP, with great power and area savings thanks to better routing. The total package volume comes in at 27.5mm x 27mm x 1.5mm. The bulk of the CPU’s height is courtesy of the extra MoP dies.

TSMC N3B Process, 4P + 4E CPU Configuration & Enhanced I/O Capabilities

The highest CPU configuration for Lunar Lake stands at 4P cores and 4E cores since Lunar Lake is a low-power solution. The CPU tile will be manufactured using TSMC’s N3B process, which leads us to believe that the SoC tile will use Intel’s home-grown 18A technology.

In terms of graphical capabilities, Lunar Lake outpaces its predecessor with 8 Xe2 cores (64 EUs, 16 SIMD) with support for Super Scaling and Real-Time RT. Intel touts a 40% efficiency improvement, but we’ll let you be the judge of that.

The platform supports 4x PCIe Gen5 lanes and 4x PCIe Gen4 lanes for I/O needs. There is also support for 3x Thunderbolt 4 or USB4 40Gbps and 2x USB3 10Gbps ports.

The leak also contains a small summary of the aforementioned information, with a list of planned CPUs. Lunar Lake-MX CPUs requiring 8W of power, can operate without a fan. Likewise, the variants that do need a fan have TDPs ranging from 17W to 30W.

The Xe2 (Battlemage) iGPU at 12W of power can push 2.5 TFLOPS of compute performance, equivalent to the Apple M1. At full potential, Lunar Lake can easily overtake even the M2’s GPU, outputting 3.8 TFLOPS, neck to neck against the Xbox Series S.

Source: YuuKi_AnS , Geddagod