Intel comes roaring back with new Lunar Lake chips to take on AMD and Qualcomm with all-day battery life, AI and serious gaming performance
Intel this afternoon launched its latest mobile processor lineup, the Intel Core Ultra 200 series (known as Lunar Lake), at an event in Berlin ahead of the start of IFA 2024.
The new system-on-a-chip (SoC) promises significantly improved performance over last year’s Intel ‘Meteor Lake’ Core Ultra 100 series, and could compete with arch-rival AMD and newcomer Qualcomm in the thin-and-light laptop market.
With the launch of Intel Core Ultra 200 series chips, laptop makers like Lenovo, Asus and others are starting pre-orders today. Shipping and in-store availability will begin on September 24.
The new chips were originally announced at Computex 2024 in June, and now we have a lot more details about the architecture and performance of these chips. Lunar Lake’s microarchitecture has been completely rebuilt from the ground up, with a new focus on power efficiency, while also delivering the kind of gen-over-gen performance improvements you’d expect from a new generation of processors.
As an example of this marriage of performance and efficiency, Intel said that for chips running at 20W, which would be around the mid-range of the laptop market, an 8-core single-threaded Lunar Lake chip would match the performance of a 22-core multi-threaded Meteor Lake chip. This is due to the triple performance per thread that the new Lunar Lake architecture offers over the previous-generation Meteor Lake chips.
Serious performance on all fronts
| Processor SKU | P-nuclei | LPE cores | Cores/Wires | Maximum P-Core Turbo Frequency | Maximum E-Core Turbo Frequency | Total cache |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Intel Core Ultra 9 288V | 4 | 4 | 8/8 | 5.1 | 3.7 | 12 |
| Intel Core Ultra 7 268V | 4 | 4 | 8/8 | 5.0 | 3.7 | 12 |
| Intel Core Ultra 7 266V | 4 | 4 | 8/8 | 5.0 | 3.7 | 12 |
| Intel Core Ultra 7 258V | 4 | 4 | 8/8 | 4.8 | 3.7 | 12 |
| Intel Core Ultra 7 256V | 4 | 4 | 8/8 | 4.8 | 3.7 | 12 |
| Intel Core Ultra 5 238V | 4 | 4 | 8/8 | 4.7 | 3.5 | 8 |
| Intel Core Ultra 5 236V | 4 | 4 | 8/8 | 4.7 | 3.5 | 8 |
| Intel Core Ultra 5 228V | 4 | 4 | 8/8 | 4.5 | 3.5 | 8 |
| Intel Core Ultra 5 226V | 4 | 4 | 8/8 | 4.5 | 3.5 | 8 |
On the graphics side, Intel is promising up to 50% better graphics performance from the new Intel Xe2 graphics cores (the same architecture powering Intel’s next-gen Battlemage desktop GPUs) over the Xe1 cores in Intel Meteor Lake. This includes better real-time ray tracing performance, which, when combined with Intel’s XeSS upscaled graphics, could make it possible to play ray-traced PC games at 1080p on low-to-moderate graphics settings on an integrated GPU.
And we certainly can’t leave out Lunar Lake’s NPU performance, considering Microsoft’s new Copilot+ AI PC push has been a major innovation in computing in 2024. In terms of NPU performance, Intel is touting Lunar Lake at up to 48 trillion operations per second (TOPS), which is one of the fastest NPUs currently on the market (Qualcomm’s competing Snapdragon X Elite chip offers 45 TOPS), and Intel says its real-world application performance in apps like Adobe Lightroom and GIMP’s Stable Diffusion plugin is significantly better than its competitors.
After all, we’re talking about laptops here, and perhaps the most important feature of this chip is battery life. According to Intel, a Lunar Lake laptop can last up to 20.1 hours on battery. That’s significantly more than any previous Intel laptop, and stands in stark contrast to recent years, when laptop battery life was considered less important than top-tier performance.
Of course, none of this has been independently tested yet, so take it with a grain of salt for now, but given Intel’s stakes, Lunar Lake at the very least bodes well for a major show of force in the AI PC market.
| Processor number | Built-in GPU | Xe2 cores | Maximum frequency (GHz) | XMX Ai-PTOP’S | Neural computing engines | NPU AI TOPPS | Memory capacity | Base processor power (W) | Maximum turbo power (W) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Intel Core Ultra 9 288V | Intel Arc 140V GPU | 8 | 2.05 | 67 | 6x Gen4 | 48 | 32 | 30 | 37 |
| Intel Core Ultra 7 268V | Intel Arc 140V GPU | 8 | 2.0 | 66 | 6x Gen4 | 48 | 32 | 17 | 37 |
| Intel Core Ultra 7 266V | Intel Arc 140V GPU | 8 | 2.0 | 66 | 6x Gen4 | 48 | 16 | 17 | 37 |
| Intel Core Ultra 7 258V | Intel Arc 140V GPU | 8 | 1.95 | 64 | 6x Gen4 | 47 | 32 | 17 | 37 |
| Intel Core Ultra 7 256V | Intel Arc 140V GPU | 8 | 1.95 | 64 | 6x Gen4 | 47 | 16 | 17 | 37 |
| Intel Core Ultra 5 238V | Intel Arc 130V GPU | 7 | 1.85 | 53 | 5x Gen4 | 40 | 32 | 17 | 37 |
| Intel Core Ultra 5 236V | Intel Arc 130V GPU | 7 | 1.85 | 53 | 5x Gen4 | 40 | 16 | 17 | 37 |
| Intel Core Ultra 5 228V | Intel Arc 130V GPU | 7 | 1.85 | 53 | 5x Gen4 | 40 | 32 | 17 | 37 |
| Intel Core Ultra 5 226V | Intel Arc 130V GPU | 7 | 1.85 | 53 | 5x Gen4 | 40 | 16 | 17 | 37 |
A great opportunity for Intel in a particularly challenging time
After announcing major layoffs and cost-cutting measures across the company in recent months, Intel could use a win.
With Qualcomm making a splash in the laptop market with its Snapdragon X-series SoCs and AMD Ryzen AI 300 chips beating Intel to market, Intel is the last of the three chipmakers to release its AI laptop chips. Intel really wants you to believe that it has saved the best for last, and the claimed performance of its new Lunar Lake chips certainly is convincing.
If Intel can deliver on the promises it made today, it will not only maintain its status as the leading laptop chip maker in a market it unequivocally dominates in terms of market share, but it will also give itself a significant boost heading into 2025, when competition from AMD and Qualcomm is expected to be fierce.
Fortunately, the more the three chip makers compete with each other for better performance and efficiency, the better it is for the end user looking to upgrade the laptop they bought during the pandemic in 2024 and 2025.
