Intel unveils Lunar Lake architecture, moves RAM on-die

Hot on the heels of AMD, here’s Intel’s next-generation processor, this time for the laptop market.

Overall, Lunar Lake represents their second generation of disaggregated SoC architecture for the mobile market, replacing the Meteor Lake architecture in the lower-end space. At this time, Intel has disclosed that it uses a 4P+4E (8 core) design, with hyper-threading/SMT disabled, so the total thread count supported by the processor is simply the number of CPU cores, e.g., 4P+4E/8T.
↫ Gavin Bonshor at AnandTech

The most significant change in Lunar Lake, however, has nothing to do with IPC improvements, core counts, or power usage. No, the massive sea change here is that Lunar Lake will do away with separate memory sticks, instead opting for on-die memory at a maximum of 32GB LPDDR5X. This is very similar to how Apple packages its memory on the M dies, and yes, this also means that as far as thin Intel laptops go, you’ll no longer be able to upgrade your memory after purchase. You choose your desired amount of memory at purchase, and that’s what you’ll be stuck with.

Buyer beware, I suppose. We can only hope Intel isn’t going to default to 8GB.