Lunar Lake wins: Is this the comeback Intel needs? (Premium)

Intel's numerous missteps over the past year would be funny if they weren't so tragic, but the microprocessor maker may have just pulled off a technological coup with its Lunar Lake processors, which seem to fulfill the company's promises at a time when it desperately needs a win.

The past year has been a difficult one for the once-mighty Intel, the hardware half of the mighty Wintel duopoly that has dominated the PC industry for as long as there has been a PC industry. Intel's market power cannot be overstated, but that is even more true when you learn how this chip behemoth has used its power and 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 neither Microsoft nor PC makers can ignore or avoid, even when their strategies have diverged.

Yet Intel has been downgraded over the past 12 months and suddenly seems vulnerable. Long accustomed to ignoring market forces that favored thin, light, and efficient mobile hardware, Intel played to its strengths with increasingly powerful but less relevant chips. Until it couldn't anymore: In late 2023, for the first time in modern times, Intel deviated from its “tick-tock-tock” release schedule (what it called process architecture optimization) and launched a new “Meteor Lake” family of mobile chips, at a time when it had traditionally led the way with desktop chips. It did that after sticking with its previous architecture for just two years, then immediately swapped Meteor Lake for the far more advanced – and more expensive to develop – “Lunar Lake” and “Arrow Lake” architectures it is now launching.

We could certainly call this dramatic series of rapid changes “tick-tick-tick.” But whatever you call it, Intel has been belated in adopting the thin, light, efficient religion that Microsoft in particular has been preaching to the company for years. That delay is tragic. But it's impressive to see the speed with which this giant has corrected mistakes that have been accumulating for over a decade in such a short period of time.

Less impressive is the impact this switch has had on the company's finances. The rush to quickly move from one architecture to the next, a process that typically takes at least three or four years for each processor generation, has resulted in massive reliability issues that dwarf notorious incidents of the past like the Pentium 5 FPU (floating-point unit) bug or Skylake. And we've only heard the tip of the iceberg on these problems so far: While Intel took the rare step of publicly admitting a serious flaw in its 13th and 14th Gen Core processors, and then took the even rarer step of fixing the issues and extending warranties for free, other problems remain. And its PC manufacturing partners, responsible for providing fixes for these problems, have remained silent as usual. Intel always listens, don't prod the bear.

Intel’s quarterly financial reports…