Intel's next-generation Lunar Lake CPUs are quite the upgrade on an architectural level and we managed to spot a working Core Ultra 7 268V silicon in its final state at Computex.
Intel Lunar Lake CPUs Are Ready To Ship, The Final Silicon of Core Ultra 7 268V Spotted With 8 Cores, 8 Xe2 GPUs & NPU4
Computex 2024 is full of hidden surprises if you know where to look and we just managed to come across a working and final silicon of Intel's brand new Lunar Lake CPUs in their final silicon design and running live demos.
The Lunar Lake CPU in question is the Intel Core Ultra 7 268V which is an 8-core SKU with 4 P-Cores based on the Lion Cove core architecture and 4 E-Cores based on the Skymont core architecture. The CPU can be seen with its official marketing name in the task manager shot that we were able to grab and features a base clock of 2.20 GHz which is about on par with the 2.3 GHz base clock of the Core Ultra 9 185H chip which is based on the Meteor Lake design. The CPU also features 14 MB of L3 and 12 MB of L2 cache. The clock speeds we saw were peaking out in the high 4 GHz range and close to 5 GHz which is quite good for this TSMC-based chip.
On the GPU front, the Intel Core Ultra 7 268V "Lunar Lake" SOC comes with 8 Xe2 cores with up to 50% performance uplift over the previous generation Arc Alchemist "Xe" GPUs and the NPU is the latest NPU4 design which offers up to 48 TOPs.
Do note that we were also able to find engineering samples of the same Intel Lunar Lake CPUs throughout Computex but those were very early samples with 1.6 GHz clocks and lower L3 cache counts of 8 MB. These chips were nowhere within the clock speed ranges as the final silicon so you should keep that in mind when comparing early silicon to final production units.
In addition to the Intel Lunar Lake chips, we were also able to see two platforms running the Core Ultra 200V CPUs, one of which was the Intel Lunar Lake "LNL-M" reference evaluation platform, or RVP in short. This motherboard platform used a red and silver colored heatsink and had an active-cooling solution. The production window of this specific chip is listed at week 35.4 (2023).
The most interesting part about this reference evaluation platform that wasn't apparent on the other laptop motherboard designs that we saw at Computex is that it lists down the specific BGA grid array & package size for the Lunar Lake "Core Ultra 200V" chips. The package size is 27.5 x 27.0 and the chips feature a 2833 BGA design which matches previous information.
Lastly, we also went hands-on with Intel's new AI DevKit based on the Lunar Lake "Core Ultra 200V" CPU platform. At the moment, the DevKit only offers Lunar Lake support but it is designed in a way to be compatible with future CPUs such as Panther Lake and Nova Lake which we were also able to confirm during Computex.
The DevKit is a really nice solution to expand the AI prowess of Lunar Lake to all of the developer community and in return, Intel could benefit from AI work-load optimizations for Lunar Lake, made using these kits. The kits will be available alongside Lunar Lake which officially launches in Q3 2024.
