Intel’s Lunar Lake CPUs should be available for the best laptops this year, and we’re just learning more about how these chips will hopefully live up to the claims made about being extremely power-efficient.
Cirrus Logic, not Intel, has announced that it will provide a new and fancier power converter chip for reference designs of notebooks powered by Lunar Lake CPUs.
The Cirrus CP9314 chip for power conversion appears to be a bit dry on the surface, but it is actually a vital component for pushing higher efficiency.
It will let Lunar Lake notebooks use power more efficiently, resulting in longer battery life. Alternatively, laptop designers who want to take a different approach may opt for more tiny batteries, allowing them to produce even smaller laptops.
Overall, the usage of this component should result in longer battery life, more portable notebooks, and lower thermals (heat production), allowing cooling to be lowered. (That means less noisy fans, which is always a good thing when you need your laptop to handle demanding tasks that cause those fans to spin up faster).
Cirrus also disclosed that Lunar Lake laptops will employ its CS42L43 codec chip and CS35L56 audio amplifier, although that silicon isn’t as fresh as the power converter, as Tom’s Hardware discovered after looking around on the Cirrus website. (The power converter isn’t even officially featured on the website yet.
The audio chip is another exciting advancement for Lunar Lake, promising deep bass and a high level of clarity Even a “proprietary rattle limiter algorithm”
The latter implies that when the speakers are turned up loud with, say, bass-heavy content, the laptop chassis and internal components will rattle less, which is certainly a good thing.
Analysis: Lunar launch this year, with any luck!
To summarize, as previously said, Lunar Lake is a specific series of CPUs for laptops aimed at being significantly more power-efficient. And this power converter chip appears to be an essential piece of the puzzle for Lunar Lake in achieving its overall goal.
Lunar Lake is slated to make its appearance with Arrow Lake later in 2024 or slightly later, although it should arrive before the end of the year (despite previous hints of an early 2025 release date – which could still happen if the range slides).
Arrow Lake is intended for desktop CPUs and higher-end laptop chips, whereas Lunar Lake is intended for thin-and-light notebooks, with an emphasis on power efficiency rather than raw performance. (It should be noted that Arrow Lake is also supposed to include low-end laptop CPUs, sitting below Lunar Lake – although this is just speculation).
So, Lunar Lake will be the primary driver of premium thin-and-lights, and the more we learn about it – and Intel’s overall renewed quest for efficiency – the more appealing it becomes.
However, as always, beware of the hype train. We need to see the truth of Lunar Lake, and we should be seeing more leaked benchmarks to give us more of an idea of where these mobile CPUs will sit soon enough. (There has already been some spilling, but in little amounts so far).
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