Intel Lunar Lake is efficient, powerful, and a hopeful turning point

Say hello to Intel’s Core Ultra 200V series CPUs, powered by the company’s Lunar Lake architecture. These processors are a far cry from their Meteor Lake predecessors, boasting seriously large generational efficiency and performance gains. There’s lots to talk about when it comes to these chips, including new core and graphics designs and comparisons to competitors. First impressions, though, are impressive and welcomingly positive.

Core Ultra 200V series processors aim to be the best CPUs for thin and light devices, which includes the likes of notebooks and handheld gaming PCs. Intel is the last manufacturer to play its hand this year, following after AMD’s Ryzen AI 300 series and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite chips. This doesn’t mean the company’s lagging behind, far from it.

If Team Blue’s claims hold true, Lunar Lake could mark the beginning of a path to cultural and financial recovery. We’ll have a clearer idea once devices with Core Ultra 200V processors hit the market September 24, with pre-orders starting today. In the meantime, here’s what Intel had to say about its latest batch of CPUs.

Intel Core Ultra 200V series SKUs

Each Core Ultra 200V series processor boats eight cores, split equally between four performance and four low power efficient cores. Each model only supports eight threads, too, as SMT hasn’t made the cut. We’ll talk about the impact Intel claims its Lion Cove and Skymont cores has on performance, as well as why the absence of hyper-threading has merit.

Also shared amongst every Core Ultra 200V series chip is built-in LPDDR5X-8,533MT/s RAM, 16GB or 32GB of the stuff depending on the model. While this does hamper the repairability and modularity of Lunar Lake laptops, the move ultimately benefit Intel’s primary goals of improving efficiency and performance.

These are the first processors to feature Xe2 graphics, in the form of Arc 140V and 130V GPUs. The former boasts 8 cores, while the latter sports 7. Similarly to CPU cores, GPU clock speeds for each vary depending on the processor model.

Finally, what mobile processor would be complete in 2024 without a neural processing unit (NPU)? Intel claims Lunar Lake offers up to 48 TOPS, with 40 TOPs serving as the floor. Of course, the latter is the threshold for Copilot+ PC certification.

Efficiency

Intel fellows have made bold claims about Lunar Lake, describing it as “the most efficient x86 processor ever.” The company’s only competitor in this space is AMD, as both Apple and Qualcomm use the ARM instruction set for their CPUs. Much as this narrows the scope of Core Ultra 200V’s victory, it’s still a large win if the claim holds up to scrutiny.

Abandoning the split core tile of Meteor Lake and adopting a unified design, housing both P cores and LP E cores, plays a large part in this. Furthermore, the additional compute power afforded by Skymont alleviates the bottlenecks encountered on Core Ultra 100 series processors. By comparison, Lunar Lake shouldn’t nearly as often default to its Lion Cove cores, increasing efficiency for everyday tasks like web browsing or those involving office applications. To put a number on it, Intel claims up to 50% lower SoC power over the two generations.

To drive this point home, Intel’s provided a set of benchmarks highlighting the performance per watt Lunar Lake offers. Of course, these results deserve a degree of scepticism, as do all from manufacturers.

It’s in Procyon Office Productivity that we see that 50% claim materialise. Not only does is Lunar Lake’s top dog more than twice as efficient as Meteor Lake’s, but it outperforms it by 7% to boot. Comparisons to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite chip, X1E-80-100, are similarly favourable, with Core Ultra 9 288V matching the performance of its competitor using a fraction of its power.

Using Core Ultra 7 165H as a baseline in gaming and general applications, we see the same story play out. Fewer watts, more performance.

Turning to battery life, Intel takes the opportunity to make a rare comparison. Finding two laptops that are identical, save for their processor, is a rare thing, but Intel has seemingly done just that. Apples to apples, Core Ultra 7 268V to X1E-80-100, Intel comes out on top with 20.1 hours of charge to Qualcomm’s 18.4 hours. Admittedly, it does lose out in a Teams 3×3 benchmark (10.7hrs vs. 12.7hrs), so there is some give and take depending on the application.

Adopting similar chassis from the same OEM, Intel is able to compare to AMD and claims a solid lead in both benchmarks. Core Ultra 9 288V quashes both X1E-78-100 and Ryzen AI HX 370, with 14 hours and 9.9 hours of battery life, respectively.

Given Core Ultra 200V’s remit of battery-powered devices, its efficiency is an important metric to its success. Intel’s improvements and claimed relative competitiveness makes for impressive reading. However, I look forward to seeing how the configurable 9-33W TDP of these processors affects results, if much at all. That’s not forgetting how they shift across system form factors with varying battery sizes and demands.

We’ll have thoughts on performance and Xe2 graphics shortly. So, don’t go anywhere!