Intel details new Lunar Lake CPUs off AMD, Qualcomm, and Apple

Enlarge / A high-level breakdown of Intel’s next-gen Lunar Lake chips, which preserve some of Meteor Lake’s changes while reverting others. (credit: Intel)

Given its recent manufacturing troubles, a resurgent AMD, an incursion from Qualcomm, and Apple’s shift from customer to competitor, it’s been a rough few years for Intel’s processors. Computer buyers have more viable options than they have in many years, and in many ways the company’s Meteor Lake architecture was more interesting as a technical achievement than it was as an upgrade for previous-generation Raptor Lake processors.

But even given all of that, Intel still provides the vast majority of PC CPUs—nearly four-fifths of all computer CPUs sold are Intel’s, according to recent analyst estimates from Canalys. The company still casts a long shadow, and what it does still helps set the pace for the rest of the industry.

Enter its next-generation CPU architecture, codenamed Lunar Lake. We’ve known about Lunar Lake for a while—Intel reminded everyone it was coming when Qualcomm upstaged it during Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC reveal—but this month at Computex the company is going into more detail ahead of availability sometime in Q3 of 2024.