Computex 2024 will be held in Taiwan next week, although manufacturers are announcing many of the new features we’ll see there. Before this event, it seemed that Intel made a specific private presentation for certain media. During the presentation, he showed the Skymont coreswhich are the efficiency cores of the new Intel Lunar Lake processors.
Currently, Intel processors use two different types of cores. On the one hand, we have the P-Cores or power cores, which act when there are large workloads like games. Next, we have the E-Cores or efficiency cores, designed for light tasks such as internet browsing, multimedia, etc.
The new processor construction is not an innovation from Intel, since the ARM architecture has been used for years in SoCs for smartphones, tablets, etc. But it’s a great solution for making desktop processors more efficient.
Intel unveils its new efficiency cores
During the closed presentation, Intel talked about the new Skymont efficiency cores. Although the conference was confidential, many presentation slides were leaked. Unfortunately, the images are of poor quality and we can extract little clear information from them.
It is worth noting that Skymont offers a “double-digit” IPC (instructions per clock cycle) improvement over Cresmont. That’s a CPI improvement of at least 10%, which isn’t bad at all. Note that Cresmont efficiency cores are used in Core Ultra 100 Meteor Lake processors.
The new efficient Skymonts will be used in the Ultra 200 core
We must remember that the CPI improvement of Gracemont’s efficiency cores over Cresmont’s was only 4%. The Skymont’s significant gain is believed to be due to improvements to the decoder unit and the inclusion of more ALUs.
Additionally, rumors point out that part of the new Lunar Lake will be manufactured by TSMC. It appears that Compute Tile will use TSMC’s N3B node and the Tile SoC will use the N6 node. Although this cannot be confirmed either, as the available images do not clearly show the information.
It is also said that the first Lunar Lake-based laptops could arrive in October this year. It’s completely normal to take advantage of the Black Friday period (to sell off “old” stocks) and the Christmas period.
Intel will probably reveal the information to everyone during its conference at Computex 2024. That will be when we can clarify the information about these new cores, as well as more information about the Core Ultra 200.
The only thing we clearly know about the Core Ultra 200s is that they will use power and efficiency cores, in addition to including NPUs. This will be the landing of specific cores for AI on desktops. Thanks to these cores, we should in theory be able to take advantage of the features of Microsoft Copilot+.