AMD Strix Halo, to be launched in early 2025, will have a 256-bit memory interface for LPDDR5x of 8 or 8.5 GHz, so it will match M1 Pro.

However, Strix Halo, which has a much bigger GPU, is designed for a maximum power consumption for CPU+GPU of 55 W or more (up to 120 W), while Lunar Lake is designed for 17 W, which explains the choices for the memory interfaces.

Lunar Lake is very clearly a response to the M1, not its larger siblings: the core counts, packaging, and power delivery changes all line up with the M1 and successors. Lunar Lake isn't intended to scale up to the power (or price) ranges of Apple's Pro/Max chips. So this is definitely not the product where you could expect Intel to start using a wider memory bus.

And there's very little benefit to widening the memory bus past 128-bit unless you have a powerful GPU to make good use of that bandwidth. There are comparatively few consumer workloads for CPUs that are sufficiently bandwidth-hungry.

The "response" to those is discrete GPUs that have been available all along.

Not really, the killer is latency, not throughput. It's very rare that a CPU actually runs out of memory bandwidth. It's much more useful for the GPU.

95GB/s is 24GB/s per core, at 4.8Ghz that's 40 bits per core per cycle. You would have to be doing basically nothing useful with the data to be able to get through that much bandwidth.

I constantly get graphical glitches on my Zenbook Duo 2024. Would recommend against going Intel if you want to use Linux.

I'm really curious about how well they run Linux. e.g. will the NPU work under Linux in the same way it does on Windows? Or does it require specific drivers? Same with the batter life - if there a Windows-specific driver that helps with this, or can we expect the same under Linux?

I’d wait for LG honestly

The chips and cheese number feels like an all-in number; get a timestamp, do a memory read (that you know will not be served from cache), get another timestamp.

The anandtech article is latencies for parts of a memory operation, between the memory controller and the ram. End to end latency is going to be a lot more than just CAS latency, because CAS latency only applies once you've got the proper row open, etc.

Use Intel's mlc (memory latency checker) tool to measure your system. On a GCE instance I see about 97ns for RAM access. On a highly overclocked gaming computer with a small amount of RAM I see 60ns. Under load, latency usually drops to about 200ns. On workstation with a lot of RAM and cores I see it drop to a microsecond.

I think the numbers in that article (the CAS latency) are the latency numbers "within" the DRAM module itself, not the end to end latency between the processor and the RAM.

You could read the article on the latest AMD top of the line desktop chip to compare: https://chipsandcheese.com/2024/08/14/amds-ryzen-9950x-zen-5... (although that's a desktop chip, the original article compares the Intel performance to 128 ns of DRAM latency for AMD's mobile platform Strix Point)

That article is about RAM latency in isolation. See this Anandtech article that shows similar numbers to chips and cheese when evaluating a CPU's DRAM latency (further down on the page): https://www.anandtech.com/show/16214/amd-zen-3-ryzen-deep-di...

The last couple of generations have had plenty of AMD options. Razer 14, Zephyrus G14, TUFbook, etc. If you get out of the performance/enthusiast segment, they're even more plentiful (Inspirons, Lenovos, Zenbooks, etc).

the review guide had everyone on 24H2; there were some issues with one of the updates that messed up performance for lunar lake pre-release, but appears to have been fixed in time for release.

I’d expect lunar lake’s position to improve a bit in coming months as they tweak scheduling, but AMD should be good at this point.

Edit: around 16 mark, https://youtu.be/5OGogMfH5pU?si=ILhVwWFEJlcA3HLO. The laptops came with 24H2