The AI laptop race is heating up once more with the debut of the new Intel Core Ultra 200V or “Lunar Lake” laptop CPUs.
Intel officially announced these updated Meteor Lake chips during Computex this summer, but right now, you can pre-order laptops packing a Lunar Lake chip. If this processor is everything Intel promises, it could give Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite chip serious competition.
According to Intel, Lunar Lake chips are the most efficient x86 processors ever. Laptops packing Intel’s new silicon promise to deliver “exceptional performance” and “breakthrough” x86 power efficiency. The company also said Lunar Lake will have “no compromise application compatibility,” a not-so-subtle jab at Qualcomm’s Arm-based Snapdragon X Elite chips and the fact that they aren’t always compatible with certain x86-based apps.
Intel says there will eventually be over 80 Lunar Lake machines from 20 different manufacturers by the end of the year. The manufacturers in question include (but are not limited to) Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, LG, MSI and Samsung.
Here’s everything we know about Intel Core Ultra 200V “Lunar Lake” chips.
Intel Lunar Lake: Release date
Pre-orders for Lunar Lake laptops start today, with systems available through online and physical stores at over 30 global retailers starting on September 24. Each of these machines will feature the Intel Core Ultra 200V series CPU, run on Windows 11, and will receive Copilot+ PC features as a free update starting in November.
Intel Lunar Lake: Performance promises
Intel is making some bold claims about its Lunar Lake chips. Not only is the company promising “breakthrough” x86 power efficiency, but it also says its chip will deliver better core performance, a “massive” leap in graphics and “unmatched” AI computing.
Getting into specifics, Intel says Lunar Lake will consume 50% less power than Meteor Lake and feature up to 120 total platform TOPS (trillion operations per second) across the chip’s CPU, GPU and NPU.
In terms of battery life, Intel claims Lunar Lake can last nearly two hours longer than Snapdragon X Elite in the Procyon office productivity benchmark test. Battery life comparisons are something we’re especially interested in given how Snapdragon X Elite-powered laptops like the Dell XPS 13 (2024) have some of the longest battery life we’ve seen on consumer-grade notebooks. If Intel manages to beat that in our testing, we’ll be impressed.
Intel also says Lunar Lake’s Xe2 integrated GPU will deliver up to 31% faster gaming performance over Meteor Lake. The company also pointed out that 23 of the games it tested couldn’t run on laptops with Snapdragon X chips due to the aforementioned Arm compatibility issue. For compatible games, Intel claims its Lunar Lake chip delivers 68% better gaming performance than the Snapdragon X Elite X1E- 84-100, which is a beefier model of the processor. Lunar Lake is also supposedly 16% faster than the AMD HX 370 for gaming, according to Intel.
One interesting thing to note is that Lunar Lake features 8 enhanced ray tracing units and enhanced XeSS, which is Intel’s answer to Nvidia’s DLSS frame rate boosting tech. This should, in practice, allow you to enjoy ray tracing in games like Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty at high frame rates.
According to Intel, Lunar Lake delivers three times more AI performance compared to Meteor Lake. The company also says Lunar Lake is 1.4 times faster when it comes to Stable Diffusion 1.5 compared to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite.
Intel Lunar Lake: Outlook
Intel is in danger of being outclassed by both Qualcomm and Apple — especially in terms of processor efficiency. But if what Intel claims about Lunar Lake is anywhere near true, then laptops with the company’s upcoming processor could be among the fastest yet.
Beyond long-lasting laptops, Lunar Lake also promises enhanced gaming and AI performance. The latter could become especially useful if the generative AI revolution the tech industry expects ever manifests. If more companies continue creating AI-powered programs that have a tangible benefit for most people, Lunar Lake laptops could lead the charge.
We’re sure to review and test Lunar Lake laptops, so be sure to come back to see if they’re as impressive as Intel claims.
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