Intel’s Lunar Lake processors should be incoming for the best laptops this year, and we’re just hearing more about how these chips will hopefully manage to fulfil the promises made about being majorly power-efficient.
This news didn’t come from Intel, but rather Cirrus Logic, which has announced that it’s providing a new and fancy power converter chip for reference designs of notebooks that use Lunar Lake CPUs.
The Cirrus CP9314 chip for power conversion sounds a bit dry on the face of it, but is actually an important component for driving better efficiency.
It’ll help Lunar Lake notebooks use power more sparingly, which in turn means better battery life. Or, laptop makers that want to go a different route might plump for more compact batteries, meaning they can produce even slimmer laptops.
Broadly, the use of this component should allow for better battery longevity, more portable notebooks, and indeed reduced thermals (heat output) and therefore cooling can be trimmed back. (Meaning less noisy fans, always a good thing when you need your laptop to tackle demanding tasks that can make those fans spin up more).
Cirrus also revealed that Lunar Lake laptops will use its CS42L43 codec chip and CS35L56 audio amplifier, but that silicon isn’t as new as the power converter, as Tom’s Hardware pointed out after doing some digging on the Cirrus website. (The power converter isn’t even officially listed on the site yet, in fact).
The audio chip is another interesting development for Lunar Lake, though, promising deep bass, a good level of clarity, and a “proprietary rattle limiter algorithm” no less.
The latter means that the speakers will cause less nasty rattling of the laptop chassis and internal components when cranked up loud with, say, bass-heavy content, or that’s the theory, which is certainly a welcome idea.
Analysis: Lunar landing this year, with any luck
Just to dive into a quick refresher, as we mentioned at the outset, Lunar Lake is a dedicated family of CPUs for laptops aiming to be far more power-efficient. And this power converter chip sounds like an important part of the puzzle for Lunar Lake towards that major aim.
Lunar Lake is expected to debut either alongside Arrow Lake later in 2024, or slightly after, but it should arrive before the year is out (even though there have been whispers around early 2025 in the past – which could still happen if the range slips, of course).
The idea is that Arrow Lake will be desktop CPUs and higher-end laptop chips, whereas Lunar Lake will be targeted at thin-and-light notebooks with the mentioned emphasis on power efficiency, rather than raw performance. (Do note that Arrow Lake is rumored to have low-end laptop CPUs, too, sitting below Lunar Lake in fact – but again, this is just speculation).
So, Lunar Lake will be driving premium thin-and-lights in the main, and the more we hear about it – and Intel’s overall renewed drive for efficiency here – the more tempting it sounds.
As ever, though, beware the hype train. We need to see the reality of Lunar Lake, and we should be getting more leaked benchmarks to give us more of a clue of where these mobile CPUs will sit soon enough. (We’ve already had some spillage, albeit a limited amount thus far).
