Intel has officially launched Core Ultra 200V Lunar Lake laptop processors. The company promises energy efficiency, a 30% performance advantage over competitors, and AI.
The company talks about a 50% reduction in power consumption compared to the previous generation of processors and, accordingly, twice the performance per watt. This corresponds to up to 20.1 hours of laptop battery life, — better than Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite and new chips AMD Ryzen AI 300 Strix Point. However, Intel avoided comparison with Apple’s processors.
Laptops with Core Ultra 200V from Intel partners are available for pre-order and will start shipping on September 24. The company showed many laptops and provided the results of its own tests. Previously Intel has already shared details of the Lunar Lake architectureand now presented the configurations of specific processors.
So, Lunar Lake processors belong to the Core Ultra 200 series with the V suffix, which indicates a new architecture. It’s just a designation that can’t be deciphered. The series includes 9 chips, all with 4 single-threaded Lion Cove performance cores (4.5-5.1 GHz) and 4 single-threaded energy-efficient Skymont cores (3.5 GHz or 3.8 GHz). The processors have 16 GB or 32 GB of LPDDR5X-8533 on-board RAM. The LLC cache (L3) is 8 MB or 12 MB, but all chips have a new Side Cache of 8 MB (similar to the system cache in ARM processors).
The processors have a base TDP of 8W to 17W (the flagship Core Ultra 9 288V is the only model with a TDP of 17W to 30W). However, the maximum consumption in turbo mode is 37W for all.
The Intel Arc 100V series integrated graphics processors are based on the Xe2 architecture and have 7 or 8 processing units. Embedded video chips operate at frequencies from 1.85 GHz to 2.05 GHz. Frequency affects AI performance, which ranges from 53 to 67 TOPS. A separate NPU has a performance of 40, 47, or 48 TOPS. The total maximum AI performance is 120 TOPS.
Intel Core Ultra 200V processors support 5 PCIe 4.0 and 4 PCIe 5.0 connection lines, which are most likely to be used in systems with a discrete graphics card. There is also support for up to 6 USB 2 ports and 2 USB 3 ports. There is built-in Wi-Fi 7, 3 Thunderbolt 4 ports (no, not TB5), Bluetooth 5.4 LE.
Intel claims «historical» x86 power efficiency — processors deliver 1.2 times more performance per watt than Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite X1E-80-100and 2.29 times larger than the Meteor Lake Ultra 7 165H. The company promises up to 2.2x better energy efficiency than the previous generation and up to 50% less power consumption than Meteor Lake, even with built-in RAM.
The Core Ultra 7 268V has a claimed 20.1 hours of battery life in the UL Procyon Office Productivity test and 10.7 hours in a Microsoft Teams call. This surpasses the 18.4 and 12.7 hours of battery life of Qualcomm Snapdragon X1E-80-100 processors. Intel Core Ultra 9 288V outperformed Qualcomm’s X1E-78-100 chip by 4.5 hours and half an hour, respectively. It also outperformed AMD HX 370 by 3.9 hours and 17 minutes.
Intel has reduced memory latency by 40% compared to the previous generation and by 30% compared to AMD Strix Point. Intel’s chip latency is only 23 ns for traffic between E-core cores and 55 ns from E-core to P-core. In comparison, Intel claims that Qualcomm’s chips have latency of 150 to 180 ns. The company claims that the combination of architectural changes gives Lunar Lake the fastest processor cores on the market with a 20% to 64% advantage in single-threaded performance over Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite. They also outperform AMD Strix Point HX370 by 3% to 33% in single-threaded tasks.
Lunar Lake delivers 2.1 to 3.0 times more performance per thread than its Meteor Lake processors. This translates to a 6% to 22% aggregate performance improvement, but with only eight cores and threads, compared to Meteor Lake’s 22 threads. Intel has also provided a performance per watt curve comparing performance at different power levels to competitive chips. Here you can see the only comparison of the Apple M3.
Intel did not miss the opportunity to criticize Qualcomm over the game compatibility issues. The company emphasizes that 23 games do not work on the Snapdragon X1E-84-100. For testing, Intel used 48 games at medium settings and 1080p. The advantage in gaming performance over Qualcomm is 68%. The increase in games compared to Meteor Lake is 31% and 16% compared to AMD HX 370.
Intel has also integrated XeSS support into more than 120 games and the fact that Lunar Lake chips have the same set of software features as its desktop graphics cards… The company also claims exceptional ray tracing performance — 30% faster than AMD HX 370 and Qualcomm Snapdragon X1E-78-100. The company also paid a lot of attention to the nuances and performance of AI.
Source: Tom`s Hardware