The fight between Team Blue and Red has been going on for decades, and as time passes, it has only gotten more intense. Intel revealed its latest Lunar Lake architecture for laptops during Tech Tour 2024, promising a significant increase in IPC for E- and P-cores by leveraging TSMC’s 3nm N3B process node.

On the other hand, AMD also made significant improvements with their Zen 5 architecture, revealing benchmarks for the desktop Ryzen 9000 series. It is important to keep in mind that both these giants are leaving nothing behind to one-up each other. This is apparent as AMD showcased its Ryzen 9 9950 X processor outperforming Intel's flagship CPU, the i9-14900K.

So, whether you lean towards Intel or AMD, this battle for supremacy will be a sight to behold, and regardless of who wins or loses, the consumer will ultimately win.

What does Lunar Lake bring to the table? 

Intel's Lunar Lake architecture dramatically changed the performance of E- and P-cores, with a maximum of 14% and 68% IPC gain, respectively. This is because of the new Skymont architecture for E-cores and the Lion Cove architecture for P-cores.

The Lion Cove architecture is designed to scale its performance depending on the power, and while that may sound like its performance will drop, it does better at lower power with 18% better performance.

In addition, Intel removed hyper-threading from the Lion Cove P-cores, which resulted in 15% more perf/power, a 10% increase in perf/area, and a massive 30% boost in perf/power/area for single-thread operations. 

Conversely, the Skymont E-cores are designed to increase scalability, workload coverage, and vector and AI throughput. The new E-cores outperform the previous generation Meteor Lake E-cores by up to 2X at peak power while the performance remains at ⅓ the power consumption. 

The above results are for single-threaded performance, but they were even more impressive for multi-threaded workloads as they delivered 4x the performance at peak power. This performance increase over the previous generation is nothing short of impressive, especially considering that it’s for the Lunar Lake Low Power Island, which is more efficient while providing more workload coverage.

How does Lunar Lake architecture compare to Zen 5? 

With everything said and done, both architectures bring impressive results and performance to the table, but the biggest difference is that they target different platforms. Ryzen 9000 relates to powerful desktop CPUs, while Lunar Lake is designed for laptops, with efficiency being the driving point. That said, the Ryzen 9000 series reportedly outperformed the 14900K by 7% to 56% in productivity, so it seems like the Zen 5 has the upper hand in the desktop domain, but we'll wait for Intel's 15th generation of desktop processors to pass surefire judgment.

On top of that, it’s one thing to compare the benchmarks released by the manufacturers because real-world testing can be different, as even changing to a slower or faster RAM can change the output of the results. So, the best answer to this question is that only time will tell, and we'll be sure to put these behemoths against each other in our suite of industry tests. If you're interested in learning more about how we test various components, head over to the PC Guide Testing Lab for more details.

When does Lunar Lake come out? 

According to Intel, Lunar Lake CPUs are set to be released in Q3 of 2025 and will power over 80 laptop designs and feature next-gen AI capabilities. So, if you were thinking of upgrading your CPU, you just have to wait a bit more.

About the Author

Ussamah Mehmood

Ussamah works as a content writer and editor at BGFG. He is experienced in tech, hardware, gaming, and marketing.