On package ram allows for some absurdly small designs, with a lot less heartache to get there (since there aren't a bunch of incredibly high speed delicate lanes to route away from the core).
Mandatory 2 (third optional) Thunderbolt ports is so excellent and offering. Gobs of bandwidth available to users, in all kinds of forms, is neat. Plus they have Thunderbolt Share, which while yes seems like an over glorified USB-IP implementation is going to be excellent for unlocking consumers to be able to hack and play with their computers.
It's a bit sad the disaggregated future promises by Meteor Lake isn't working out, that there needs to be one huge Compute Tile like this. The Platform Chip really is back to being a fairly uninteresting south-bridge like part.
The performance numbers look great. It's excellent seeing Intel having some really strong chip engineering chips like this. Hopefully 18A and beyond can be a viable home for some of these excellent cores or derivatives.
> Intel also says it now is beating not just AMD but also Qualcomm in battery life. This is a disaster for Qualcomm as power efficiency has been the main selling point of its parts over Intel and AMD. It needs to show it can win because if you have used a Snapdragon X Elite device, there are still things that do not run on Arm.
Good to know that there's a viable Snapdragon equivalent for Chromebooks now. Remember, for whatever reason Qualcomm made an exclusive deal with Microsoft.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2355435/intels-lunar-lake-is...