Intel reveals first Lunar Lake laptop CPUs: everything you need to know

Do good things come to laptop buyers who wait? Today, Intel is revealing its first nine answers to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite and AMD’s Strix Point laptop chips — and the company claims the new Core Ultra 200V lineup, formerly known as Lunar Lake, can meet or beat them in almost every way.

When the first wave of laptops ship on September 24th, they’ll have “the fastest CPU core,” “the world’s best built-in GPU,” and “the best AI performance,” according to Intel. Where Qualcomm versus AMD was a question of battery life versus graphical performance, Intel claims its new chips do it all.

For example, Dell is just now announcing a new version of its flagship $1,400 XPS 13 laptop with Lunar Lake that’s basically identical to the current model in every other way: same chassis, same dimensions, same screen, same 55 watt-hour battery pack. And yet, Dell says it now gets up to 26 hours of 1080p Netflix streaming at 150 nits of brightness, up from 18 hours previously.

That’s a 44 percent improvement, which is a giant leap for Intel, if true. (Never mind that the Qualcomm version of the XPS 13 quotes a slightly longer life of up to 27 hours.)

Another example: Intel says an Asus Zenbook S 14 with Intel can last multiple hours longer than an Asus Zenbook S 16 with AMD in office tasks, despite the AMD laptop’s slightly larger 78Wh battery pack:

And on gaming, Intel claims it’s finally pulling ahead of AMD and absolutely clobbering Qualcomm, with its Core Ultra 9 288V boasting 68 percent better frame rates on average than the top-shelf Qualcomm X1E-84-100 in a Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge and 16 percent better frame rates than the AMD HX 370 chip in the Asus Zenbook S 16.

You’ll want to zoom in on these slides to see how Intel claims your fave games might run at 1080p medium:

And that’s without using Intel’s XeSS upscaling. With it, the company claims even ray-traced games are within reach of its integrated GPU, such as 45fps in Cyberpunk 2077, 57fps in Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered, and 66fps in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. (Intel didn’t provide resolution and graphical settings for the ray-traced claims, though.)

On AI, Intel claims its new machines offer far faster performance than Qualcomm when using Adobe Premiere and Lightroom features, among other apps:

Like we’ve discussed previously, these Lunar Lake laptops should have excellent baked-in connectivity: Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, and a minimum of two Thunderbolt 4 ports to guarantee speedy USB-C connectivity, charging, and up to three 4K monitors.

But before you run out and preorder a Lunar Lake laptop, there are a couple other things you should know.

Intel’s marketing hides it well, but Lunar Lake isn’t the most powerful laptop processor out there. It’s not even Intel’s most powerful.

Every one of Intel’s nine Core Ultra 200V chips has just eight CPU cores, eight CPU threads, a maximum of eight GPU cores, and up to 32GB of RAM, with no way to add more in the future. One of Intel’s key efficiency improvements was getting rid of separate memory sticks or chips, baking it into the CPU package instead. Intel also did away with hyperthreading, the technique that let CPU cores run more than one thread.

And while Intel says its eight-thread Lunar Lake chips can beat a 14-thread or 22-thread Meteor Lake chip at lower wattage, last-gen Intel chips can actually pull ahead when given more power — as does AMD’s HX 370. Here’s the slide that shows that:

Want more cores, more threads, and more RAM in an Intel laptop? That’s what Intel’s Arrow Lake is for, and it may be coming as soon as October 10th.

Remember when Core i3, Core i5, and Core i7 meant different numbers of CPU cores and threads? Lunar Lake throws that out the window; it’s got fewer dividing lines than ever.

Here’s the easiest Intel decoder ring I’ve ever written, at least until Arrow Lake arrives:

As you can see below, your typical processor name will be something like “Core Ultra 7 258V.”

• Every chip has four performance cores, four low-power cores, and at least seven GPU cores and five neural compute (AI) engines. Most chips have a default 17W TDP.
• Ultra 7 means it has eight GPU cores instead of seven, six neural compute engines instead of five, and 12MB of cache instead of 8MB.
• Ultra 9 additionally has a minimum wattage of 17W and a default wattage of 30W, a lot more than every other chip in the lineup!
• The first processor digit is always 2, and that just means these are Intel’s second-gen Core Ultra chips. If Arrow Lake also begins with 2, as rumored, this may not be particularly helpful.
• The second digit goes up based on processor speed. “2” chips currently turbo up to a maximum of 4.5GHz on the CPU and 1.85GHz on the GPU, with larger numbers bumping those up in 200MHz or 100MHz or sometimes just 50MHz increments.
• The third digit is RAM. “6” means 16GB of memory, while “8” means 32GB.
• The V means Lunar Lake, Intel’s Robert Hallock tells PCWorld, with S, U, and H parts coming later on different architectures.

As you can see, only 300MHz of turbo clock and 100MHz of GPU max frequency separate Intel’s flagship Ultra 9 288V from its lesser Ultra 7 258V — but the wattage boost might matter a lot more than MHz for performance. Can’t yet say!

Intel has made some big claims that need to be tested in the coming weeks, as laptops like the Dell XPS 13 and Asus Zenbook S 14 make their way into reviewers’ hands — and when we tested Qualcomm’s and AMD’s big claims earlier this year, not all was what it appeared.

The Asus Zenbook S 16 with AMD Strix Point was an excellent laptop but also an AI no-show, and one that didn’t meet AMD’s bold claims of beating Apple. And while Qualcomm wowed on battery, we quickly found it wasn’t ready for gaming. Speaking of, can Intel’s laptops game like it says while unplugged from the wall? I would hope so based on this earlier demo and their quoted power efficiency, but Intel hasn’t told me so.

You should expect to see a lot of Intel Lunar Lake laptops get announced real soon — Intel confirms that Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, LG, MSI, and Samsung are all among the manufacturers building 80 different laptops around the Core Ultra 200V chips launching this week, and many will open preorders immediately.

But you don’t need to jump, and they may get better while you wait. Intel says they won’t even ship with Microsoft’s own Copilot Plus AI features like live captions and Windows Studio Effects; those will arrive as a free update starting in November, says Intel.

Update, September 3rd: Added what the “V” means in each processor’s name.