Computex 2024 kicked off in Taiwan this week with Intel and AMD unveiling new PC chips set to power Copilot+PCs.
The new chips come after Microsoft and other manufacturers unveiled the new Copilot+PC category running on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X-series chips. One of the main requirements for the category is a neural processing unit (NPU) capable of at least 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS). Intel and AMD both surpass that, with the former offering up to 48 TOPS and the latter up to 50 TOPS.
Intel shared new details about its Lunar Lake chips, available in Copilot+PCs later this fall. The NPU is a big improvement over Meteor Lake’s 10 TOPS, but it’s far from the only upgrade. Lunar Lake will sport new Xe2 graphics with up to 80 percent faster gaming performance. Intel is also making Lunar Lake more efficient, boasting up to 40 percent lower power than the previous gen.
Part of the power efficiency gains come from Intel moving memory onto the chip, similar to what Apple does with its M processors. Lunar Lake chips will be available in 16GB or 32GB options, and unfortunately, people won’t be able to add more memory down the line. However, by bringing the memory closer to the processor cores, Intel said it reduced latency and system power usage by 40 percent.
Elsewhere, Lunar Lake sports revamped performance and efficiency cores (P- and E-cores) along with an “advanced low-power island” for handling background tasks to get 60 percent better battery life than Meteor Lake.
On the AMD side, the new Ryzen AI 300 series uses AMD’s XDNA2 architecture for the NPU, RDNA 3.5 for the integrated GPU (which also now has up to 16 compute units) and Zen 5 for the CPU. AMD says its XDNA2 NPU has five times the compute capacity and double the power efficiency compared to the previous gen.
Interestingly, we have more concrete details about the AMD Ryzen AI 300 series availability. In July, the chips are heading to some of the Copilot+PCs announced at Microsoft’s recent event. That includes the Asus Vivobook S 15 and HP OmniBook.
Both Intel and AMD appear to be shifting into high gear to take on Qualcomm, which muscled its way into the Copilot+PC space with ARM-based Snapdragon X chips. Qualcomm’s chips supposedly have better battery life and performance than previous-gen x86 chips from Intel and AMD, but it’ll be interesting to see how everything stacks up once reviewers get their hands on devices.
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