Intel just announced their new Lunar Lake Core Ultra Series 2 chipsets with big gains in efficiency and graphics. So, let’s quickly look at the specs, and improvements in Intel’s new innovation, and what Intel Lunar Lake means for you and me.
Intel Lunar Lake Overview
It’s all about efficiency
It seems like the laptop market is all about efficiency with power to boot at this point. What started with Apple’s M series, has now carried over to all major chip makers with AMD and Qualcomm offering their own efficient Phoenix Point and Snapdragon X processors. Intel’s Meteor Lake Core Ultra Series 1 had a similar focus on minimizing power consumption and boosting battery life, but truth be told the competition was just ahead of the race.
So, Intel recently unveiled their Series 2 Core Ultra SoCs code-named Lunar Lake in Berlin. With these new chips, Intel claims its spot as the one to pick for best endurance among the Windows choices. The company claims up to 50% less power consumption than its predecessors with up to a ridiculous 20 hours of battery life on office tasks. Besides that though, there are upgrades throughout with an improved CPU, better graphics, and a stronger AI engine.
Cutting corners on the cores?
Intel’s new Series 2 of Core Ultra chips all ship with just 8 cores and no hyperthreading. That sounds like a downgrade from last-gen’s 16 Cores (max) but Intel reasons that this has led to improved efficiency without sacrificing (single core) power. All 9 SKUs feature 8 Cores and 8 Threads with differing clock frequencies, TDP, AI cores, and memory specifications. This new re-design boasts an improved CPU single core with a big boost to efficiency.
Decoding ‘Core Ultra 9 288V’
Since Intel has decided to change the naming scheme once more, let me catch you up to speed. There are a total of 9 Lunar Lake laptop chips with 4 Core Ultra 5s, 4 Core Ultra 7s, and a Core Ultra 9. The name follows a ‘Core Ultra (5/7/9) 2 (X)(X)V’ pattern where the first digit after 2 indicates the tier (less/more clock speed) and the second hints at memory capacity (higher/lower).
For instance, Core Ultra 5 228V and Ultra 5 236V have equal number of cores across the board, but while the 2’3’6V clocks at a maximum of 4.7GHz, the 2’2’8 only reaches 4.5 GHz. But on the flip side, the 22’8’ supports up to 32GB of memory while the 23’6’ only supports up to 16GB.
So, Core Ultra 9 288V has the highest clock speed (5.1GHz) while supporting 32GB of LPDDR5X memory at 8533 MT/s.
Best iGPU on the market
Another big improvement is the new Xe 2 integrated graphics that promises the best gaming performance in the market. It’s up to 30% faster than the Arc graphics on the Core Ultra 7, about 16% better than AMD’s offering, and blows Snapdragon out of the water. For context, your next Intel laptop will be able to render Night City in CyberPunk at a playable 40-ish FPS, crank some gears in Forza at over 60 FPS, or snatch victory royals in Fortnite at nearly 90 FPS all without any kind of upscaling. So, with Intel’s XeSS, you can pretty much run any modern game at 1080p medium settings on the new Lunar Lake-powered notebooks.
AI and Extras
Last but not least, these Intel Lunar Lake chipsets also seem to have the best AI engine for laptops with improved workflow across software like Blender, Lightroom, After Effects, and Filmora. The NPU can push up to 48 TOPS on a Core Ultra 9 and up to 40 TOPS on the base Ultra 5 226V. Connectivity options include integrated WiFi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, and support for up to 3 Thunderbolt 4 ports.
Intel Core Ultra 200V Lunar Lake Availability
Intel Lunar Lake laptops with Core Ultra 200V processors will be available starting September 22nd. All of the major vendors are refreshing one or more of their models with the new chipsets so you can expect your favorite thin and light notebook to be available with a Core Ultra 200V soon. That includes Dell’s XPS 13, Asus’ Zenbook S 14, LG Gram Pro, MSI’s Prestige 13 + Evo, and many more. We’ll be sure to cover them when they make it to Nepal in the future.
- Meanwhile, check out our take on what an AI laptop is in 2024:
