The Six Five team discusses Intel Lunar Lake Benchmarks
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Transcript:
Patrick Moorhead: Intel Lunar Lake benchmarks, they are out. They came out, let me see, three days ago on the 24th. And essentially, Lunar Lake was a chip that has a big NPU, very similar to what Qualcomm brought out first and AMD brought out second. AMD argues they did come out first with a larger NPU, but there wasn’t a whole lot of software to be able to take advantage of that. But the claims that Intel made on this chip were, we’re going to have superior performance and superior battery life. And Intel has always had good performance, but when it comes to battery life, Intel and AMD didn’t do great.
Also, a little fun fact. The tiles that are used in Lunar Lake are not manufactured at Intel. They’re actually manufactured at TSMC. So, it’s on, right? You have AMD, Qualcomm and Intel Solutions now battling it out on design, as opposed to Foundry and Fab technologies. So it’s literally mano-y-mano. A one unique architectural thing that Intel adds, they put memory onto the package and you can do some pretty interesting stuff related to latency and lower power. So how they do, so to me, it mostly as I expected from single-threaded CPU performance, many-thread performance, MT, graphics, and battery life, and NPU. But I got to tell you, it raises a lot more questions than I have answers, because the benchmarks that I saw across four or five websites, and by the way, Signal65 has yet to publish our tests, but they are on the way. Single-threaded CPU performance, pretty good. Some tests had Qualcomm leading, PC World had Intel leading. Okay? On the same benchmarks.
Daniel Newman: There’s only one real test, right? It comes from Signal65. I mean, are there really other tests?
Patrick Moorhead: There’s really only one definitive test house and that’s Signal65, as we say in jest. No, PC World had a pretty good analysis. But we had both Tom’s Hardware and PC World saying different things, like who won, on the same benchmark. Okay? MT, many threads, I knew. I mean, you’re doing 12 cores on Qualcomm versus eight cores. And even if you have a single-threaded processor that operates a lot quickly, there was just no way that Intel was going to win here. And many threads, Intel and AMD are dominant, okay? When you’re using this at the same time. Office productivity performance under Procyon, Intel gets the crown. One of the things that threw me was not only the benchmarks that went back and forth, even on the same test, but it was the plugged versus unplugged. I should have known this because AMD has had higher performance plugged in, you get a lot of boost out of that. But I thought with Lunar Lake starting over, that that would not be the case. Qualcomm has very consistent performance when it’s unplugged, and it appears that when you unplug Intel, the performance drops handily, particularly on the CPU.
Most confusing part was battery life. Tom’s hardware had Qualcomm winning by 35%. Forbes on Procyon video had Intel leading by 12%. Forbes Procyon productivity on Forbes, they had it Qualcomm winning by 9%. And that Procyon productivity battery life was the one that Intel said they destroyed everybody on. So, here’s my thought. I was an OEM for almost 10 years on the PC front, and I worked at AMD for 11 years. And let me just tell you, this tells to me that this product was moved out quickly. And if you remember, Intel pulled this product in from what was likely a January launch, into to hit the fourth quarter. There were only two platforms that were benchmark-able, one from ASUS and one from Dell. And if you compare that to the Qualcomm launch, I mean, it was Dumbo dropping multiple solutions from Lenovo, HP, Dell, and even Samsung.
There could be power profile issues. Right? That’s what I’ve been told, which is, hey, when you need to benchmark something and when, but I think there’s something in the firmware, there is got, probably going to be an update that will probably give answers. And I’m leaning on Ryan to be able to have his team put some of this stuff into perspective. My final comment here is this was the seven series, so there’s five, seven, and nine. There is a nine series coming out that is supposed to be a higher performance. And I believe that Intel staged this likely to hey, we want to get the battery life, that’s the monkey on our back. We want to get that out first, and then we’ll follow through on performance with the nine series. And I don’t expect the nine series to have as good a battery life as the seven series. So that’s it, Dan.
Daniel Newman: So you covered a lot of ground and I know we’ve got to wrap this up, so I’ll just make a couple of maybe more macro comments. One is, Signal65 will be the arbiter, and we will put our thoughts out there. Look for Ryan Shrout on the Twitters or X, whatever you call it, to share some of that data as it comes out. We are looking at all of this stuff. And you’re right, there were some good reviews, so I’m not saying there aren’t others, I’m just saying we are going to do a very thorough job here. The second thing is that, Pat, is I think what Intel got, what Intel wanted, and I’m going to tell you what that is. It’s not obvious. It’s not obvious. I think there was some concerns that it was going to be, they were going to just get blown out across the board and that would’ve been really bad for Intel. But with the combination of the design with the tiles done at TSMC, they’ve been able to build a part that again, even in one particular hub that says their battery life is better than the ARM, in the ARM-based processor, that’s kind of like, even just creating a toss-up is kind of a win for Intel. Look, I’m using a Qualcomm device every day, I’m really pleased with it. This is not a knock on what they’re doing. I’m using almost all arm devices now. It’s just what’s happened to come across my desk in recent.
Having said that, Pat, the Lunar Lake part seems to be very competitive. That’s what Intel needed here. They needed it to be very competitive. They needed it because remember, Intel’s the incumbent here. So I believe it’s the competition within a benefit of a doubt being so much better. That is going to be what’s required for a meaningful market shift. And so if Intel’s number one goal, given its difficult times, Pat, was protect the moat, that is your strongest business right now. These numbers do not give clear read to the channels, to the commercial customers, to the retailers, that they have to go all in yet. I’m not saying the ARM stuff’s not really good, Pat. I’m just saying I think for Intel, this was about as good as they could have hoped for in this current juncture. A pretty good set of responses and not a very clear output of who’s better, because it depends. And so that’s where my takeaway was. You definitely dug into the depths, but I know we’ve got a roll.
Patrick Moorhead: Dude, come on. I’ll tell you when we got to a roll. I’m the guy who has to roll.
Daniel Newman: All right, all right. We don’t got to roll. Keep going then. No.
Patrick Moorhead: No, that was really, I’m glad you gave the macro because the question is, how good does it need to be? Okay? And Intel is the incumbent. It’s a lot harder to switch people off Intel in enterprise because they’re very conservative, they don’t want to screw something up here. And if Intel gets close, and even price doesn’t even matter that much. And that’s why AMD has had a hard time getting traction. I hear that AMD is stepping up what they’re doing in the enterprise, related to marketing. I’ll believe it when I see it. Qualcomm is going to have to do this as well. But yeah, people were skeptical on what Lunar Lake would deliver and they, I think had a showing that was better than people expected.
Daniel Newman: Not losing was winning.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, the YouTubers were like Intel destroyed Qualcomm and AMD, and I don’t know what they were smoking out there. Now, there’s two reviews that I’m looking forward to. Linus Tech tips, and maybe a hardware unboxed. But yeah, I mean it’s-
Daniel Newman: It’s competitive, which is great, right?
Patrick Moorhead: Intel is competitive, right? And then you take the money cannon. Now, Intel is probably losing money on Lunar Lake. Okay? I don’t know if it’s like 10% gross margin or what’s going on, but that is a very unprofitable product for them. It’s kind of weird. How can it be profitable for Qualcomm and AMD? Because Lisa Su doesn’t create money losing products. And then, why is Lunar Lake so unprofitable? I’ve got to dive underneath that and it could be complexity in the design, it could be the size of the dyes, the tiles, or something like that. But theoretically, Intel gets healthy with Panther Lake, which is the follow on 18-A.
