Intel is currently prepping its mobile-only Meteor Lake platform to launch later this year, followed by its next-generation offering named Lunar Lake. We don't know a ton about this platform, given it's still more than a year away, though Intel has stated it will be an entirely new architecture designed for low-power applications. Now we have a morsel of new info from a reputable hardware leaker that says it'll indeed be using the company's Arc Battlemage for its integrated GPU, and it could have as many as 8 Xe2 cores, making it similar to its current Arc Alchemist entry-level A380 discrete GPU.
News of Intel's possible plans comes from a notable leaker on Twitter/X named Bionic_Squash. The newest tidbit of info states Lunar Lake will offer 64 second-generation execution units, which indicates 8 Xe2 cores. That means it'll use Battlemage, Intel's second-generation GPU architecture, to succeed its current Arc Alchemist platform. It's already suspected that Intel will use Alchemist for the GPU in Meteor Lake and its desktop successor, Arrow Lake. Therefore, it will be ready to move onto Battlemage for Lunar Lake, expected in late 2024.
We already know that Lunar Lake will target a 15W environment, so it'll only be used for thin-and-light notebooks and other low-power devices. Therefore, this is a modestly beefy iGPU, given the light power consumption involved. It should have 64 EUs, lower than the 96 EUs found on its current Raptor Lake chips. According to Wccftech, Meteor Lake is expected to offer 128 EUs, so it'll be a bump up from its existing iGPU, and Arrow Lake will knock that up further to 192 EUs as well. However, both Raptor and Arrow Lake are power-hungry desktop chips.
This is also not an apples-to-apples comparison between core counts simply because Battlemage will bring numerous architectural changes that will provide performance uplift all on their own. It's widely expected to offer a significant performance boost over Alchemist, simply because of the amount of time that will have transpired between architectures and because it's Intel's second bite at the apple, and it indeed learned a lot with Alchemist.
Lunar Lake was initially expected in 2025, but it seems to have been moved up to 2024 to debut alongside Arrow Lake on the desktop. It will be the company's second generation "Core Ultra" mobile platform and will thus feature the number 2 in its naming schemes, such as Core Ultra 5 2003H, which makes our heads hurt just thinking about it. Lunar Lake will be made on Intel's 18A process, which is expected in late 2024.
