Intel Core Ultra 200V Lunar Lake Lands: Big Gaming, Battery Life Boost

What’s new with Core Ultra 200V and Lunar Lake?

Intel has announced its Core Ultra 200V Lunar Lake mobile processors that are available to pre-order today in a range of thin and light notebooks from the likes of Asus, Dell, LG and MSI. The new CPUs boast 30% faster gaming performance compared to the previous generation, up to 20 hours of battery life as well being much faster than AMD and Qualcomm equivalent laptops across a range of tasks including games.

The new CPUs boast 30% faster gaming performance compared to the previous generation, up to 20 hours of battery life as well being much faster than AMD and Qualcomm equivalent laptops across a range of tasks including games.

ForbesIntel Arrow Lake Now Core Ultra 200 : Everything Else We Know So FarBy Antony Leather

Core Ultra 200V Impressive gaming performance: No AMD or Nvidia GPU in sight

Demos were on hand at the launch event in Berlin this week, showing frame rates above 60fps at maximum settings in games such as F1 2024 Thanks to Intel’s Xe2 graphics, which was 68% faster in games than Qualcomm’s X1E 80-100 and 16% faster than AMD’s HX 370.

Power efficiency first: 20 hour battery life

The biggest gains, though, were in battery life and efficiency. In some scenarios you could see up to 20 hours battery life in office tasks thanks to the new Lunar Lake Core Ultra 200V series processors offering 50% lower power consumption.

The claims from rival Qualcomm were impressive a few months ago, with claims of battery life approaching 20 hours. Intel is claiming slightly over 20 hours compared to Qualcomm’s similar X1E 80-100.

More E-cores

Intel has managed this by increasing the number of E-cores on its new CPUs compared to the previous Meteor Lake Core Ultra 100 series, which now have 8MB side cache and memory on package. This results in drastically lower power consumption than the previous generation of CPUs.

Adding extra efficient Skymont E-cores along with double the L2 cache means more tasks can be handled by them instead of more power-hungry P-cores, which are then free to handle demanding tasks such as gaming. As well as a sizeable 30% leap in GPU performance over the previous generation, the Xe2 graphics has twice the power efficiency too.

The end of hyper-threading for Intel?

Interestingly, Intel has ditched hyper-threading (also known as simultaneous multi-threading) from its Lunar Lake CPUs. The reasoning behind this according to Intel’s David Feng, VP client computing group, who I spoke to at the event, is the design of it’s latest CPUs with their hybrid architecture of E-cores and P-Cores. A hybrid core design can operate more efficiently and critically use a lot less power per thread than hyper-threading, which has been used in its more traditional CPUs for over two decades.

In its thin and light laptop CPUs at least, the trade off has now reached a point where having multiple threads running on a single core actually results in a negative trade-off in the balance between performance and power consumption. Power consumption is also in the spotlight with its desktop parts too and rumors are afoot that suggest it may ditch hyper-threading with its Arrow Lake desktop CPUs too.

New laptops

Asus Zenbook S 14

The new Zenbook S 14 was on show complete with its beautiful Ceraluminum case as well as a 14 inch touch 3K 120Hz screen

LG gram Pro

The new LG gram one one of few laptops available in a larger 16 inch format, but like previous grams, it’s exceptionally light at just 1,199g and also has a 2,560 x 1,600 144Hz screen – perfect for productivity, and it’s also just 12.4mm thick.

MSI Presige 13 AI+ Evo

The 13 inch model of MSI’s Prestige AI+ Evo was on show, but there will be 14inch and 16 inch models available too. The 13 inch model shown here weighed less than 1000g.

I’ll be back with more from the event so follow me here on Forbes using the blue button below, Facebook or YouTube to get the latest news.