LG Gram 16 Pro to be unveiled at IFA 2024 with an Intel Lunar Lake CPU that should be able to handle AI tasks with ease
LG has announced its latest thin and light laptop, the new LG Gram 16 Pro. It will be LG’s first notebook with an Intel Core Ultra CPU from the Lunar Lake family. It is now being presented at the IFA 2024 trade show.
LG is calling these the Intel Core Ultra Series 2 processors, referring to the fact that they’re the follow-up to the original Core Ultra mobile CPUs, Meteor Lake, and LG is underscoring the boost in AI computing that’s coming here. The official name is the Core Ultra 200V series (codenamed Lunar Lake as mentioned).
This is LG’s first laptop to qualify as a Copilot+ PC, as its Lunar Lake chip is Intel’s first mobile chip with an NPU powerful enough to meet Microsoft’s demands: the Core Ultra CPU offers an NPU with 48 TOPS.
The NPU isn’t the end of the story for AI performance though, with LG pointing out that the Lunar Lake CPU gets 67 TOPS thanks to the integrated GPU, and with the processing power of the processor thrown in you get up to a total of 120 TOPS with Lunar Lake’s top-of-the-line laptop chip. It should be noted that TOPS is a measure of AI processing performance (you can read about it in detail here).
As LG claims, the Gram 16 Pro can better handle “advanced AI features such as productivity assistants, text and image creation, and collaboration tools,” making those tasks faster and more responsive.
LG’s Gram 16 Pro will launch in late 2024, we’re told, but no further details on specs or pricing have been provided. Those will undoubtedly be coming.
Analysis: Much faster than a fast meteor
Essentially, LG says the refreshed Gram laptop is very capable of handling Copilot and its AI functionality, and in particular on-device (locally processed) AI tasks. That includes typical workloads like image capture or AI-powered editing features, which are built into Windows 11’s Paint and Photos apps, respectively. Rendering a photo, for example, will be much faster on a laptop with 120 TOPS.
To put that into perspective, if you compare that to the Meteor Lake – first-generation Core Ultra processor – that was inside the LG Gram Pro 16 which came out earlier this year, that chip offered a total of 34 TOPS (of which 10 TOPS were provided by the NPU). So Lunar Lake isn’t far off from quadrupling the AI performance here, which is of course a big old leap.
The much more powerful AI performance that Lunar Lake delivers will be particularly important for Copilot+ PCs and their core AI features that are on-device workloads, the most obvious example of which is the controversial Recall AI-powered search. That feature returned to testing in preview with Windows 11 in October, and is expected to finally ship with the 24H2 update.
