Intel’s Hope for a Brighter Future: Lunar Lake’s Promising Arrival

The idea that Intel is on the verge of collapse or will be cannibalized by AMD, Nvidia, or Qualcomm is a notion that doesn’t quite add up. For one, as the only domestic chip fabricator in the US, the government can’t afford to let Intel fail, both economically and militarily. So, let’s put the demise of Intel out of our heads.

It’s also highly unlikely that a regulator would allow consolidation in such a critical industry, just like Nvidia wasn’t allowed to buy Arm. Intel might have to give up certain market segments to focus on others, but that’s not the death knell some people are making it out to be.

But what’s really got me excited is what I saw at IFA 2024. Intel’s Lunar Lake is about to hit the market, and it’s looking like the most impressive consumer processor I’ve ever seen in a laptop – arguably the most important edge computing device out there. Yes, it’s better than Arm and AMD, and yes, it’s better than Apple. And it will put Intel firmly back at the top.

Now, I know it’s understandable that people are concerned (or giddy, if they’re a hater) about Intel’s current position. The company has definitely been struggling, especially with its recent layoffs and underwhelming performance from Raptor Lake Refresh and Meteor Lake.

On the client desktop side, AMD Ryzen chips are currently the better enthusiast CPUs, and Intel has been steadily losing market share. Meanwhile, Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X series of laptop processors have nearly doubled battery life while giving “good enough” performance through x86 emulation, which eliminates the biggest impediment to Windows on Arm – app compatibility.

But here’s the thing: Intel Lunar Lake is about to change everything. When it comes to the consumer market, there was a bit of a scare for Intel about Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X processors, which are genuinely impressive. However, everything I’ve seen about Lunar Lake at IFA 2024 has been undeniably impressive, and unlike Apple, Intel has provided plenty of data to show the performance gains achieved over Meteor Lake and better performance over rival AMD and Qualcomm chips.

The time I’ve spent looking at these laptops at IFA 2024 definitely reflect this kind of performance, so even if I get different numbers than Intel has claimed, it likely won’t be so far off the mark that Intel would have been straight-up lying to us. And the battery life? Forget about it. These numbers completely negate the main advantage of Qualcomm’s latest chips and outclass AMD’s best laptop CPUs.

Arm, meanwhile, still can’t run most of the best PC apps natively, instead relying on emulation to get the job done. This emulation can be hit or miss, and you’ll never really know which app will run and which won’t. This isn’t a problem for Lunar Lake, since all of these apps are designed to run on x86 from the jump, which means they will all be compatible with Lunar Lake.

Intel Lunar Lake’s timing couldn’t be better for Team Blue, or worse for Qualcomm. The biggest problem for Intel would have been if Qualcomm had enough time on the market to gain some buy-in from consumers, which would have incentivized app developers to make Arm-native versions of their apps to serve a large market segment. But with Lunar Lake laptops launching on September 24, not enough time has passed for Qualcomm Snapdragon X laptops to really gain traction, so as people start looking for laptop deals during the holiday season, chances are they’ll end up buying many more Lunar Lake devices than Qualcomm ones, blunting that momentum and making it less likely that app developers will build native Arm apps.

As such, Intel will always have the performance and graphics advantage over Qualcomm, and without the benefit of superior battery life, there will be very little to recommend Qualcomm over Intel. Simply put, Lunar Lake is arriving just in time to shore up the one area where Intel cannot afford to lose market share. As AMD moves towards parity on desktops and Nvidia runs away with Intel’s data center customers, Intel’s last redoubt will be the largest consumer market for computers going right now: laptops.