Lunar Lake for the Win: Is This the Comeback Intel Needs? (Premium)

Intel's multiple missteps this past year would be comical if they weren't so tragic. But the microprocessor maker may have just pulled off an engineering coup with its "Lunar Lake" processors, which appear to live up to the company's promises at a time when it desperately needs a win.

The past year has been a difficult one for once-mighty Intel, the hardware half of the powerful Wintel duopoly that's dominated the PC industry since there's been a PC industry. Intel's market power can't be overstated, but that's even truer when you learn how this chip making colossus has leveraged that power and its size to undermine rivals like AMD and now Qualcomm through partnerships that often amount to little more than cash payments and other subsidies. Intel has been both great and terrible, the one hardware company that both Microsoft and PC makers can't ignore or avoid, even when their strategies diverged.

But Intel has been knocked down a peg in the past 12 months, and it suddenly seems vulnerable. Long accustomed to ignoring the market forces that favored thin, light, and efficient mobile hardware, Intel played to its strengths with increasingly more powerful but less relevant chips. Until it couldn't: In late 2023, Intel for the first time in the modern era shifted from its "tick-tock-tock" (what it called Process-Architecture-Optimization) release schedule and pushed out a new "Meteor Lake" family of mobile chips at a time when it traditionally led with desktop chips. It did that after sticking with its previous architecture for just two years, and then immediately ghosted Meteor Lake for the far more advanced--and expensive to develop--"Lunar Lake" and "Arrow Lake" architectures it's now launching.

We might fairly refer to this dramatic series of quick shifts as "tick-tick-tick." But whatever you call it, Intel has belatedly gotten the thin, light, efficient religion Microsoft, especially, has been proselytizing to it for years. That delay it tragic. But it's impressive seeing the speed at which this behemoth has moved to correct a decade-plus of mistakes in such a short period of time.

Less impressive is the impact this shift has had on the company's finances. Its rapid push to move quickly from architecture to architecture, a process that would typically take at least three or four years for each processor generation, has led to massive reliability issues that dwarf infamous past episodes like the Pentium 5 FPU (floating-point unit) bug or Skylake. And we've only heard the tip of the iceberg about these issues: While Intel took the rare step of publicly acknowledging a serious flaw in its 13th and 14th generation Core processors, and then the even rarer step of resolving the problems and extending warranties for free, other issues remain. And its PC maker partners, responsible for shipping fixes for these issues, have remained silent, as always. Intel is always listening, don't poke the bear.

Intel's quarterly financial reports...