Lunar Lake was made official last night. If Intel’s presentation is anything to go by, its new Intel Core Ultra 200V ‘Lunar Lake’ processors represent a historic leap forward for thin and light platforms (in other words, ultrabooks). Everything has been completely rethought, with new processor cores (Lion Cove and Skymont), a new GPU architecture(Battlemage) and, of course, a small dose of AI for cutting-edge performance and efficiency. Obviously, Intel has used its own benchmarks to highlight the performance that future buyers of Lunar Lake-equipped laptops will enjoy compared to those equipped with AMD and Qualcomm. In a jab at Qualcomm in particular, Intel went to great lengths to explain that for these benchmarks, the company preferred to run them on production laptops from its many partners rather than on an ideal model optimised in a lab…
The most efficient x86 processor ever designed
For several weeks now, Intel has been very confident about the qualities of its latest baby. Based on a Core Ultra 9 288V, Intel claims that it offers 129% better performance per watt than a Core Ultra 7 165H (Meteor Lake) and 20% better performance per watt than the Qualcomm X1E-80-100 in the UL Procyon Office productivity test. This test, which models the use of Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, is clearly a use case for the potential user of an ultrabook. In terms of pure performance, the Meteor Lake CPU and the Snapdragon X Elite are on a par, while the new Lunar Lake outperforms them by 7%. However, the most spectacular aspect is obviously power consumption. Compared with Meteor Lake, Qualcomm has 49% less package power and Lunar Lake has 53% less package power in the benchmark.
But Intel did not limit itself to showing figures relating to office and productivity applications. Several current games were used to showcase the new Xe2 graphics solution. Intel produced a comparison with a Meteor Lake CPU (Core Ultra 7 165H). Assassin’s Creed Valhalla ran 32% faster with the Ultra 9 288V, which consumed 35% less energy. Cyberpunk 2077 delivers 44% more performance for 22% less power consumption. Farming Simulator 22 delivers 68% better performance and 11% lower power consumption.
Compatibility, the argument that hurts Qualcomm
Intel has taken great pleasure in stressing the importance of games, particularly in order to hit Qualcomm where it hurts. Because when a game wants to run on a Snapdragon,Intel has an average lead of 68% between the Core Ultra 9 288V and the Snapdragon 45. Above all, the list provided by Intel shows an impressive number of titles that do not run at all on the Windows Arm platform.
Lunar Lake: First trend.
Obviously, recent news confirms that we should be wary of announcements and benchmarks delivered by manufacturers. But Intel knows that it is due for a major announcement, and once again, the serenity displayed and the multitude of details provided is undoubtedly an indication of the level of confidence the blue teams have in their new baby. The performance and power consumption figures presented by Intel are impressive, and we’ll be sure to check them out very soon with our own tests.
