The Six Five team discusses Intel Lunar Lake Copilot+ Chip Announcement
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Transcript:
Daniel Newman: So, let’s talk about Intel. I’ll kick this off because I was in the room. Intel had a big moment. This next core ultra launch, Lunar Lake. This is the newest node. This is their breakthrough product that really made that competitive in AIPC. They’ll talk about the 20 million Meteor Lake units shift.
But that part in terms of the NPU and the competitiveness of the part was somewhat subdued, but it was the first in the market. So, it’s one of those things where I always say there’s a left and a right to the story. The left is they did shift 20 million. It was the highest volume AIPC in the market. But from a competitiveness standpoint, it really didn’t meet, it certainly didn’t meet the Microsoft Copilot+ PC metrics that were required. But that’s all been done now. Those sins are in the past. And now officially, Intel was able to parade the executives from every major OEM onto the stage to reaffirm their commitment to a design-heavy, volume-heavy cycle with this new Lunar Lake chip. And then of course, Pavan Davuluri from Microsoft came on stage to confirm that this will be an official Copilot+ PC announced at EFA.
This was a good moment for Intel during a really bad time. And I won’t dig into the rest of the bad time here because that’s a whole nother topic that we’re going to talk about here in a few minutes. But they talked about a 20-hour battery life. Listen, I’m going to say this. Signal65 has done some work, our firm, yours and mine’s, beautiful baby. Signal65 that tests the performance on this. We did some work on the matrix of compatibility. You actually saw that flashed up on the stage in the presentation that their compatibility across AI workloads and software was pretty impressive. The 20-hour life, I want to see it. I would hope Intel in this particular moment in time would be really highly scrutinizing of any claim like this they make, because if they’re wrong, they’re going to get absolutely crushed. I’m hoping it’s right because from a competitive standpoint, that’s great. Making big progress, X86 becomes more viable to be able to deliver that kind of performance, low power.
That was the biggest thing that I got out of was that number, that metric. Of course, they have a really strong gaming story right now. They’ve been able to really lean into the gaming story, the GPU story, which again is part of it. I know we love talking NPU, but GPUs really matter with AI, especially if you can have that with the low power. And this AI hub, this performance thing that they’re doing for being able to do LLMs, do graphics and do code, I thought that was pretty cool too. That was kind of my first seeing it in real time, seeing it perform. And so, it was a really positive announcement, Pat. And by the way, I talked about the parade, but I mean you had Dell, you had Lenovo, you had Microsoft, you had, I think it was Microsoft HP, Alex Cho who we ran into, and several others, also Google, which by the way, Google came on and for Intel, don’t think Google showed up this week with Qualcomm, which was interesting as well. So, among all the chaos at Intel, there’s still a lot of proof points to be made. There’s still volume proof to be made. There’s still execution that has to be done. Intel is under much greater scrutiny than anyone else, but it was a positive moment.
Patrick Moorhead: Dan, that was a great breakdown. I did get a little bit of FOMO watching you.
Daniel Newman: It was these, right? It wasn’t the actual announcements because you were watching. It was just all the selfies you couldn’t be in with me. I missed.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, not being in those selfies is a big hit. So, listen, you did good macro. I’m going to do a little bit more micro here. Lunar Lake has exceptional single-threaded CPU performance. Part of that is the newly architected cores that they have. These are single-threaded and not multi-threaded. They’re very, very efficient. So, kudos to the team for that. There’s embedded memory, which is going to give you a pop as well because you can more tightly couple the system to the memory. Apple did it and Intel’s doing it here. I’m expecting the best graphics performance in this class of processors. And you can either take that to gaming or you can take that to AI. Less efficient AI than the NPU, but much more efficient AI than the CPU. You get 100% app compatibility as well. Microsoft Qualcomm and ARM have done a stellar job getting ARM native compatibility out there, and there are roadmaps for the more difficult ones that hit like the .sys that aren’t just a loader issue but require native and you can’t do them emulated like VPNs and basically malware detection, stuff like that.
If, and a big if, this is the key part here, Danny, you hit this. If the battery life claims or bore out across different use cases, this is a very good thing for Intel. And I will be impressed and I will be surprised that once we get these into our Signal65 labs, that this bears it out. And here was the claim, 20 hours on Intel versus 18 on Qualcomm and 10 on AMD using Procyon productivity, which is independent third party. I just want to see it myself. I want to see exactly the conditions that AMD and Qualcomm were tested. Now, we’ll see. Here is where Lunar Lake will get beaten. It will get beaten on most multithreaded applications because of core count. It’s very simple. Even if Intel has more efficient cores on ST, you throw more cores at it. Eight cores on Lunar Lake versus 12, 12 and 10 cores. I, with 100% degree of certainty, will tell you that on MT CPU scores, Qualcomm with 12 cores will beat Intel with eight. Windows AI in November, Copilot+ ready. There’s a lot of historical examples of being ready. There was Windows 8 ready. There was Windows 7 ready and now there’s Copilot+ ready. I don’t know if that’s exactly what we’re going to see on the sticker, but it’s the way it’s going to be positioned. And having Pavin up on stage from Microsoft talking through this almost just makes that go away.
Daniel Newman: Hey, that’s a great dive. That’s why Perplexity tells the world that you’re smarter at the deep dives and I’m the high-level macro guy. That’s why we’re so good together. We should get married.
Patrick Moorhead: We really should, Dan. We really should. And I think-
Daniel Newman: I mean we have two beautiful children, The Six Five-
Patrick Moorhead: Well, that’s so good. I was not expecting that. That’s really good.
Daniel Newman: But I don’t know. We also brought, we have our children from our previous marriages, a Futurum Group and Moor Insights. But anyways, that was a good dive, man. Listen, one quick question for you while I change the topic. What’s at stake in your opinion, if that battery life thing backfires? Because I mean, again, you mentioned third party. That’s the thing I keep raising my hand is what’s at stake here because it seems like it was so bold.
Patrick Moorhead: I mean, they lose credibility in a time that they’ve lost a lot of credibility. I am comforted by the fact that they use the Procyon benchmark, which is hard to game, but until I see it, it’s going to be hard. And then there’s the, with the Qualcomm laptops, I can close that thing, stick it in a drawer for two weeks and bring it out. And maybe the leakage was like 5%.
Daniel Newman: It’s amazing. It’s amazing.
Patrick Moorhead: I had a Mac ARM-based Mac sitting in a drawer for a year. I opened that thing up, it had 30% battery life. I have never ever had an X86 laptop that did that.
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
