Intel has already confirmed that it will release two new processors this year. Among them, Lunar Lake is the true successor to the existing Meteor Lake, focusing on ultra-low power consumption, especially for ultrabooks; Arrow Lake, on the other hand, returns to high performance and will be used in desktops, laptops (especially gaming laptops), and servers.
The architectures of both are very similar. Currently, available information shows that the big cores for both are Lion Cove, the small cores are Skymont, the integrated graphics are Xe LPG, and the manufacturing process may be Intel 20A, at least confirmed for Arrow Lake.
Now, a screenshot of Lunar Lake running on Windows 11 Task Manager has been leaked online, showing 8 cores, 8 threads, 14MB of L2 cache, 12MB of L3 cache, and a frequency of 1.8-2.8GHz.
Firstly, its big and small core combination is 4P+4E, which theoretically should result in 12 threads, but only 8 are present, confirming rumors that Hyper-Threading has been canceled.
Intel Hyper-Threading Technology was introduced in 2002, initially for Xeon under the name Super-Threading, and later extended to the Pentium 4, becoming a standard feature of Intel processors.
After introducing a hybrid architecture with Alder Lake, the 12th generation Core, the small cores could not support Hyper-Threading, and it was expected that Intel would find a way to enable small cores to keep up, but instead, it was completely cut.
The small cores also do not support the AVX-512 instruction set, leading to its cancellation across several generations, but Intel has already planned its return.
Secondly, the capacity of the L2 cache is surprisingly larger than the L3 cache because each big core has 2.5MB, while the four small cores share 4 MB.
Thirdly, the frequency is very low, but this is normal for an A1 stepping early sample and is positioned for ultra-low power consumption, so the final frequency will not be too high.
Previous leaks indicated that Lunar Lake will have 8W and 30W power consumption levels, integrate package memory, and support LPDDR5X-8533, with up to 8 Xe cores for the integrated graphics.
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