Intel Lunar Lake is ‘better than anything you’ve ever seen before’ (msn.com) This is the official confirmation I was looking for, that everyone is going to come out swinging in the next generation chip wars. Intel were the last people to jump on the gpu bandwagon, but they're so enormous coming to the party this late means they can do whatever they want, and they wanted a more efficient gpu all along. Now, they've apparently tweaked their new gpu design to work more efficiently with their cpu, suggesting its their first real new pc architecture in over 15 years. Everyone is going for an All-in-Wonder chip, that anyone can plug and play with all they want, that runs on about 7w or less. The one stupid chip in your laptop, can easily cost more than the rest of it combined, and Intel wants to use 7w chips that demand the laptop manufacturers lower their production costs. In response, Microsoft has come out with ARM laptops that are possibly 20% less efficient, but much lower cost. That doesn't mean Microsoft won't buy Intel's new chips, but they're unwilling to pay a premium, and ARM chips have already proven competitive for low power applications. Anyway, it could easily be another three years of this, but this is the path to "Unified Memory" that could make all of our computers simple plug and play devices. The Apple Trash Can, is an example of what you can do by simply daisy chaining computers, because their architecture supports a unified memory designed for it.
The Intel we know is dead, but its new Lunar Lake chips are very much alive (msn.com) What the article doesn't say, is Intel heavily refined their 7nm process, and this stupid chip is merely an example of the commercial ones they want to sell. They decided 7nm was good enough for the consumer chips, because their architecture is ahead of the competition, and using an older node saves money. They're also working with Nvidia to put their newest Blackwell on ARM chips, but Looney Lake being 19% more efficient than ARM is partly just Intel's access to superior technology. They actually preordered every extreme ultra violet lithography machine ASML sells, for the next year, just to make sure nobody else got one. They're going in big time for 3D chip stacking and, theoretically, you can put a small supercomputer on something the size of a pencil eraser, but they're still doling out the technology, and refining it. To make a larger stack, requires more efficient transistors, so they're just balancing costs between smaller nodes and stacking.
