Intel's next-gen Lunar Lake CPU demo poses more questions than it answers

pcgamer.com:

We're still waiting for Intel's next-gen Meteor Lake CPUs to make retail availability. All the expectations are that those chips will be limited to laptops and the desktop will only receive a minor refresh of the existing Raptor Lake chips. But now comes news that Intel has been showing off yet another new generation of CPUs, known as Lunar Lake.

As things stand, Lunar Lake is at least three generations hence, or four if you count the Raptor Lake refresh. After Meteor Lake and that Raptor refresh comes the next proper update for the desktop, known as Arrow Lake. It's only after Arrow Lake that Lunar Lake will arrive.

So, you could argue, who cares? Let's at least get Meteor Lake and Arrow Lake out the door and see what they're like before we get too excited by Lunar Lake.

However, the thing is that Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has shown Lunar Lake not just booting into Windows, but running actual workloads. More to the point, according to Intel's own public roadmaps, Lunar Lake is based on Intel's 18A process tech. Again, that's three nodes out from the current Intel 7 node used for its most advanced available CPUs. Before Intel 18A arrives, Meteor Lake will roll out on Intel 4 and Arrow Lake on Intel 20A.

Gelsinger showed Lunar Lake running several AI-related workloads at the recent Intel Innovation 2023 conference, including an AI-powered music generation tool known as Riffusion and the more familiar text-to-image Stable Diffusion tool. So, Lunar Lake is looking pretty healthy at this early stage.

That all sounds like good news for Intel's promise to deliver five new production nodes in four years. At which point, the caveats arrive in force. First, 18A is really a derivative of 20A, so the way Intel is counting nodes is