- Intel has announced Lunar Lake Core Ultra 200V processors that consume 50% less power than Meteor Lake chipsets.
- Intel is promising 20 hours of battery life on Core Ultra (Series 2) processors. It even matches Snapdragon X Elite perf/watt figures.
- The Xe2 GPU and NPU have also been upgraded significantly. The NPU can deliver up to 48 TOPS.
After much anticipation, Intel has finally introduced its Core Ultra 200V series processors, also known as Lunar Lake mobile processors. The Core Ultra mobile processors (Series 2) are completely redesigned for efficiency. Intel says the new Lunar Lake processors will break the myth that x86 can’t be as efficient as ARM processors such as Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X series chipsets.
First of all, the Core Ultra 200V processors feature 8 CPU cores (4P+4E) across all nine SKUs, packing newly-designed Lion Cove (P) and Skymont (E) cores. In addition, Hyper-threading is not available on Lunar Lake, and LPDDR5X memory is now directly installed on the SoC package in either 16GB or 32GB configuration. The memory speed is 8,533 MT/s.
Intel says Lunar Lake Core Ultra 200V processors consume up to 50% lower power than last year’s Meteor Lake processors. And in comparison to the ARM-based Snapdragon X Elite (X1E-80-100) chipset, the top-end SKU (Intel Core Ultra 9 288V) delivers 1.2x performance per watt. This means Intel not only matches Qualcomm’s efficiency numbers but performs 20% better which is pretty huge if we go by Intel’s claim.
In the UL Procyon Office Productivity test, Intel Core Ultra 7 268V achieves a battery life of 20.1 hours whereas SD X Elite (X1E-80-100) gets 18.4 hours. However, in Microsoft Teams, SD X Elite lasts two hours longer than the Lunar Lake processor. By the way, Lunar Lake even beats AMD’s recent HX 370 processor by a wide margin.
Lunar Lake processors have a frequency range between 3.5GHz to 5.1GHz. And the default TDP is 30W (including memory) with a turbo power boost of up to 37W across all SKUs. Fanless laptops may have a TDP between 8W to 17W.
The Xe2 GPU is also quite powerful packing eight 2nd-gen Xe cores with Ray Tracing and XeSS (Super Sampling) support for AI upscaling. The new GPU delivers up to 31% better GPU performance than Meteor Lake; 68% better than SD X Elite GPU, and 16% better than AMD HX 370 GPU. The GPU can also perform up to 67 trillion operations per second (TOPS) to process AI workloads.
Finally, the NPU can perform up to 48 TOPS and it even beats the Snapdragon X Elite NPU in the UL Procyon AI Computer Vision test. In the Geekbench AI test, Intel’s NPU consistently delivers better AI performance than Snapdragon X Elite’s Hexagon NPU in many data types. You also get Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 support with Lunar Lake processors.
Overall, it seems Intel has designed a series of powerful and efficient x86 chipsets that can rival both Qualcomm and AMD. We are very excited to test out Core Ultra 200V processors and see how well they perform in real-world scenarios. Intel says Core Ultra 200V processors will get all Copilot+ PC features, and they will be available for pre-orders from September 24th.
