Intel’s latest Lunar Lake processors are designed for power efficiency for thin and light laptops and handheld gaming PCs. The official name is Intel Core Ultra 200V and Intel says the Lunar Lake processors will have up to 50% lower power consumption, better built-in graphics and of course, better at handling AI workloads.
How’s it more power efficient? Well, for starters there are more Efficiency Cores and Performance Cores. A total of 4 e-cores take care of menial tasks and conserve battery through careful software and hardware optimisation. Intel also showcased productivity benchmarks at IFA Berlin and they seemed to go toe-to-toe with Qualcomm’s Elite processor and sometimes beat it too. The processor also tops out at 30W so it’s meant to compete with ARM-based chips and sit inside thin laptops like LG Gram, MSI Prestige and even Dell XPS.
As for gaming, we saw F1 2024 running on an AMD system with 65FPS and the same game on Intel Lunar Lake running at 80FPS. Qualcomm chip was running F1 2020 because the newer games don’t run on Qualcomm so gaming on Intel Arc GPU is better than the rest currently.
Intel says there’s a 30% increase in GPU performance alone from the previous Core Ultra processors. Of course, even AI tasks inside Adobe Premiere Pro are supercharged by the GPU which helps in cutting down work time.
As for the NPU, the benchmark says up to 48 TOPS but the Intel Arc Graphics can do 67 TOPS, so the Lunar Lake can leverage the NPU and GPU for AI workloads depending on the software. The Core Ultra 200V processors also support Wi-Fi 7, Thunderbolt 4 and Bluetooth 5.4.