Skip to main content

Intel CEO says that Lunar Lake was ‘a one-off’

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger presents Intel's roadmap including Arrow Lake, Lunar Lake, and Panther Lake.
Intel

Intel’s CEO Pat Gelsinger talked about the future of its top processors in the company’s latest earnings call. Apart from reporting a huge $16.6 billion loss, the earnings call revealed a bit about next-gen products like Panther Lake and Nova Lake. According to Gelsinger, those two generations of laptop CPUs will not follow in Lunar Lake’s footsteps. In fact, Gelsinger referred to Lunar Lake as “a one-off.”

Lunar Lake introduced a first for Intel — at least in terms of consumer processors. It came with on-package LPDDR5X memory, which brought Intel closer to some of the highly successful M chips manufactured by Apple. On-package memory can improve data transfer speeds and boost efficiency, and Lunar Lake was also proven to have solid battery life. Despite these benefits, Intel isn’t going to give Lunar Lake a direct successor.

Recommended Videos

In the earnings call (as shared by VideoCardz), Gelsinger explained that Lunar Lake was always meant to be a niche product, but circumstances changed, making it a high-volume one.

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger holding a Panther Lake chip.
TweakTown

“Lunar Lake was initially designed to be a niche product that we wanted to achieve the highest performance and great battery life and capability, and then AI PC occurred. And with AI PC, it went from being a niche product to a pretty high-volume product. Now, relatively speaking, we’re not talking about 50 million, 100 million units, but a meaningful portion of our total mix from a relatively small piece of it as well,” said Pat Gelsinger.

Get your weekly teardown of the tech behind PC gaming
Check your inbox!

However, Gelsinger went on to say that the complex integration of on-package memory affects Intel’s profit margin too much, and it appears that the company isn’t going to repeat this design in Panther Lake and Nova Lake CPUs. Although both are considered direct successors to Lunar Lake, they won’t feature on-package memory.

Gelsinger elaborated on Intel’s plans, saying: “So it really is, for us, a one-off with Lunar Lake. That will not be the case with Panther Lake, Nova Lake, and its successors as well. We’ll build it in a more traditional way with the memory off package in the CPU, GPU, NPU, and I/O [input/output] capabilities in the package. But volume memory will be off-package in the road map going forward.”

Gelsinger also confirmed that Panther Lake is currently slated for release in the second half of 2025. The CPUs will be the first client CPU generation based on Intel’s 18A node, which Gelsinger says is both more performant and cheaper to manufacture.

There was no mention of Intel’s next-gen Battlemage GPUs during the earnings call, but Gelsinger spoke about simplifying the road map and said there’s now “less need for discrete graphics in the market going forward.” That doesn’t bode well for Intel’s discrete graphics department, but we might not find out more until CES 2025.

Monica J. White
Monica is a computing writer at Digital Trends, focusing on PC hardware. Since joining the team in 2021, Monica has written…
Intel’s new Arrow Lake CPUs can still consume a ton of power
Pins on Core i9-12900K.

Intel has made a big deal about the efficiency of its upcoming Arrow Lake CPUs, which are looking to earn a spot among the best processors when they release later this week. Some early benchmark results HXL on X (formerly Twitter) show that the CPUs can still draw a ton of power if you stray from Intel's default power settings, however.

The post, which you can see below, shows the Core Ultra 9 285K peaking at 370 watts of power draw in Cinebench R23's multi-core test. The CPU itself is blacked-out, but you can tell it's the Core Ultra 9 285K from the 24 cores picked up by Cinebench. The Core Ultra 9 285K has a maximum turbo power of 250W, according to Intel, and a base power of 125W.

Read more
Intel is bringing back one of its most frustrating types of CPUs
Intel Core Ultra Series 2 Lunar Lake chipset.

Intel's new Arrow Lake CPUs are a big deal. They utilize an entirely new architecture and come with a new socket, which will help them compete for a spot among the best processors. However, it looks like some upcoming Core 200-series CPUs (the non-Ultra versions) might not use the Arrow Lake/Lunar Lake architecture at all -- they might be rebranded CPUs sporting older CPU tech.

The assumption comes from results in the Crossmark benchmark that were posted to Bapco and first pointed out by Everest on X (formerly Twitter). The result shows the Core 5 210H, but it's not the performance that's interesting. It's the specs. The result shows that the CPU comes with eight cores and 12 threads. That's the rub. Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake don't come with Hyper-Threading, so each core only comes with a single thread.

Read more
I’m worried Intel is making a mistake with Arrow Lake
Someone holding the Core i9-12900KS processor.

For the last several years, every new generation from Intel has felt like a make-or-break moment. Now, with Arrow Lake CPUs, the stakes are even higher. Intel is facing unprecedented financial troubles, and although it still makes some of the best processors, the silicon giant that used to loom over the PC industry isn’t as strong as it once was.

Arrow Lake is yet another major shift. The CPUs kill Intel’s long-standing Hyper-Threading feature. They introduce two new core architectures. And they debut the Core Ultra branding on desktop, along with the new LGA 1851 socket. I’m worried that Intel’s strategy won’t work with Arrow Lake, though.

Read more