Intel next-generation Lunar Lake-V Core Ultra 200V processors carry fewer cores and soldered RAM in an attempt to manage power consumption. Aimed at battery-powered devices, this series targets a 30W maximum power rating.
Previously called Lunar Lake-MX, whispers suggest Lunar Lake-V will feature eight CPU cores comprised of four P-cores and four LPE-cores. On the graphics front, eight Xe2 cores reportedly sit inside its Battlemage iGPU portion. To keep power consumption under control, Intel fused the RAM chips very close to the CPU, directly on the substrate. Since core counts should remain identical between models, differentiating factors include the amount of L3 cache, GPU EUs, and RAM.
In addition to lowering power requirements, this approach allows the use of much faster DRAM. While a laptop’s RAM speed generally hovers around the 5,600MT/s mark, according to Golden Pig, this CPU comes bundled with 8,533MT/s LPDDR5X memory. However, you’re stuck with the amount of RAM it comes with because it’s soldered. There are no backsies or upgrades possible.
Reports suggest that the combo has between 17W to 30W of power to work with. It’s not much by laptop standards, but perfectly suited for handheld devices such as Steam Deck. This means we will most likely see portable gaming machines powered by this CPU. Here’s hoping it fares better than Meteor Lake in MSI Claw.
If we believe prior rumours, the Lunar Lake-V Core Ultra 200V should offer 50% higher performance than Meteor Lake Core Ultra 100 in multi-threaded workloads at 15W. Yes, that’s a very specific scenario. though it sounds good if true.
Lastly, Intel should continue pushing for higher AI performance, with rumours talking about up to 3x faster NPUs. We may get some official specs this summer at Computex, so stay tuned.