Lunar Lake announcement: Intel throws a wrench of efficient x86 CPUs into Qualcomm's Snapdragon party

[Redaktion]

At the same time when many new laptops with Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite are being announced, Intel is revealing the first details about Lunar Lake. The coming CPU architecture is supposed to be much more efficient than other Intel platforms. Intel will release Lunar Lake in Q3 2024.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lunar-Lake-announcement-Intel-throws-a-wrench-of-efficient-x86-CPUs-into-Qualcomm-s-Snapdragon-party.839667.0.html

[Mr Majestyk]

While I'm hoping Lunar Lake lives up to expectations, I'm not holding my breath. Meteor lake has been a huge letdown, barely offering any improvement in performance per watt and no IPC improvement over Raptor Lake. Also, Lunar Lake will be facing the might of Strix Point not Hawk Point. Finally Lunar is on 4P + 4E apu in the U class segment so is not a top tier part and won't compete against H/HX class parts.

[Hifihedgehog]

LOL. Intel has said this 100s of time with Intel Atom and never delivered. Stop lying, Intel.

[NikoB]

Remember I wrote 1-2 years ago that it will be funny when AMD and Intel start competing on the same technical process efficiency? And now it seems to have happened in reality. Intel, realizing that it was not able to make SoCs at its backward factories, placed orders with TSMC. Here we need to make a very important digression:
If Intel found a place in the queue for such huge wholesale orders at TSMC factories, then a fair question arises from consumers and experts, why AMD's share was not increased in the same way at times at TSMC?

Do you see what I'm getting at? This once again proves that AMD is essentially an antitrust ploy, because no one stopped it from squeezing Intel, but it has deliberately not done this in the market of consumer processors and SoCs for 5 years now. Even the lack of money for a price war is not an excuse, with a clearly better product, it was possible to take loans for expansion in the x86 market share of more than 50% on laptop SoCs and PC processors.

Apparently AMD management has some ulterior motives for not expanding their company's market share in the x86 market. And this clearly goes against how the "free market" should work and the desire of any company to capture as large a share of the market as possible.

Now let's move on to the main thing. Intel clearly had the best team optimizing and squeezing the best out of older processor technology. Having gained access to TSMC's "3-5 nm", obviously Intel should logically take the lead even against Zen5 cores. Otherwise, again a rather strange situation.

In any case, we remember the main thing - the difference in the scale of SoC production for laptops between Intel and AMD (due to the fault of management) is almost 5:1. So, no matter what AMD releases, it will appear en masse after the announcement no earlier than 1-1.5 years on the market, and all this time Intel will skim the cream off the market with its overwhelming market share, simply because buyers will not be able to buy AMD products.

Only a sharp increase in market share to at least 50/50 in favor of AMD guarantees the absence of ulterior motives and secret agreements between Intel and AMD.

And all this is also funny because the x86 architecture itself is shameful today, especially for the shameful memory controller of both companies (especially slow in the case of AMD) - memory bandwidth is at least 2 times lower than it should have been 5 years ago, and Now the difference has reached 3-4 times.

Against this background, let me remind you once again (and I warned about this many times before, anticipating this) that only AMD's Strix Halo series, for the first time in x86 history, will have a 256-bit memory controller (with unknown efficiency) and that is characteristic (once again I laugh as I clearly foresaw this and AMD proved exactly my point of view on all this), only this version of Zen5 will have real support for UHBR20 in igpu, which means only this version will be the first in the consumer segment to have support for 8k monitors in lossless mode, albeit at a low level by modern standards, a frame rate of 60Hz, but up to 36-bit color. That is why even this version of Zen5 (like all dgpus to the shame of NVidia/Intel) is already obsolete, because do not have support for 8k@120Hz, which requires 160Gbit/s bandwidth and this also excludes the operation of such an interface over copper wires. This has recently been proven in practice with scandals with long cables, which work extremely poorly in UHBR20 mode with a length of more than 1 m.

The future that I dreamed of with 8K resolution and finally perfectly sharp text and graphics in monitors has not yet arrived and the movement towards this has been going on for 6 years already, although 8K screens were capable of making 8K screens already 10 years ago...

Since the advent of 8K monitors with diagonals of 27-32" - buying a new monitor will make sense, only in terms of higher contrast and color depth, as well as frame rates and lower response times. And there are no good options here yet. AMOLED always flickers (when good color rendering and color depth), it always has a glossy finish and always fades faster than IPS, which is good for the eyes in office and daylight, but bad for video/cinema in complete darkness (poor black level) and has problems with response time.

And for a perfect microLED (like the hope for a screen with super contrast, matte, with a good resource of 30k hours and good color rendition and color depth and at the same time without flickering or at a high frequency above 1.25 kHz, minimum) we will probably wait even longer +10-15 years even better than getting 8k monitors on your desktops in mass-market PCs...

[RobertJasiek]

NikoB, yours is one theory. Alternative theory: TSMC did not offer AMD acceptable terms but offered them to Intel maybe because the order was a magnitude larger.

[NikoB]

What prevented AMD from ordering many times more? After all, its SoC is clearly better and has been and is in great demand. What stopped AMD management from doing this, other than a secret agreement with Intel - not to be a greyhound and sit on its market share, like Intel's anti-monopoly pad?

It is moments like this that show crystal clearly that AMD did not and does not have any problem increasing orders for TSMC several times, but they deliberately did not do this.
Q.E.D.