Lunar Lake debuted – the most energy-efficient x86 processors of all time according to Intel

Intel has finally announced the release of Core Ultra Series 2 processors, also known as Lunar Lake. The announcement is timed to coincide with the upcoming IFA 2024 exhibition, where many laptops with new processors will debut. When creating the Core Ultra 200V series chips, Intel focused on ensuring high energy efficiency – the company even calls them “the most efficient x86 processors of all time.”

Image source: Intel

Intel claims that the power consumption of Core Ultra 200V processors has been reduced by up to 50% compared to the previous generation Meteor Lake-H chips. There is also a more than twofold superiority over its predecessors in terms of performance per watt of energy consumption. And compared to competing Qualcomm chips, performance per watt is 20% higher.

As a result, Intel notes, laptops with Core Ultra 200V processors will provide up to 20 hours of battery life. In addition, Intel compared Lunar Lake with Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite and AMD Ryzen 9 AI HX 370 processors, in almost identical laptops. In both Teams and the UL Procyon benchmark, the Lunar Lake processor delivered better battery life than its competitors.

Lunar Lake processors will offer only up to four high-performance P-cores with Lion Cove architecture and the same number of energy-efficient E-core Skymont cores. “Large” cores will operate at up to 5.1 GHz, and small cores at up to 3.7 GHz, depending on the processor model. We also immediately note that Lunar Lake has built-in RAM LPDDR5X-8633 with a capacity of 16 or 32 GB.

An important feature of the Core Ultra 200V is the lack of multi-threading support for “large” cores for better energy efficiency, so the new products offer fewer threads than their Meteor Lake predecessors. And yet, the new Lunar Lake will be faster than their predecessors – during the summer presentation, the company stated that Lion Cove will provide an increase in IPC of 14%, and the new Skymont E-cores will provide a 38% increase. Now Intel has corrected the data – the IPC increase for Skymont cores was 68%.

Compared to the 14-thread Meteor Lake-U, the new eight-thread Lunar Lake processor is 22% faster while limiting power consumption to 9 W, according to Intel. The new Professor is also 10% ahead of the previous Meteor Lake-H with 22 threads at 17 Watts. And only at a TDP of 23 W, the predecessor with a larger number of cores and threads is 6% faster. By the way, the maximum consumption of the new chips reaches 37 W.

A separate point of pride in Lunar Lake is the built-in Battlemage graphics processor, which is built on the next-generation Intel Xe2 architecture. In the new architecture, the base kernel has been redesigned. It now includes eight 512-bit vector processors (XVE) and eight 2048-bit Xe Matrix Extension (XMX) processors. This allows eight 512-bit multiplies in XVE to be performed per clock, as well as 2048 FP16 operations or 4096 8-bit integer operations in XMX. Both tools can be used for both 3D graphics and AI tasks. And the new Xe2 cores have received an improved ray tracing unit. Maximum GPU clock speeds will range from 1.85 to 2.05 GHz depending on the model.

Integrated graphics in Lunar Lake will offer performance of 53 to 67 TOPS (trillion operations per second) for AI workloads. According to Intel, the new chips’ integrated GPU will be faster than its fastest last-generation GPU, which was used in the higher-power Meteor Lake-H chips. On average, the eight-core Intel Arc 140V GPU is 31% faster than the older Meteor Lake graphics.

Compared to the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite, which can’t actually run many games, Lunar Lake had 68% better overall performance in Intel’s gaming tests. Compared to AMD Ryzen AI 9 370 HX, Lunar Lake processors also have an advantage according to Intel, although less – 16%.

Last year’s Meteor Lake became the first Intel processors with a built-in NPU neural engine for AI acceleration. However, this AI accelerator could offer performance of only 11.5 TOPS, which is a far cry from the coveted 40 TOPS required by Microsoft to meet the Copilot+ PC standard. The new Lunar Lake aims to eliminate this shortcoming, since its improved NPU can provide from 40 to 48 TOPS depending on the processor model. In total, Intel talks about overall AI performance at the level of 120 TOPS, which takes into account the power of the CPU, GPU and NPU.

Pre-orders for the first Lunar Lake-based laptops begin today, and systems from Asus, Dell, Acer, MSI and Lenovo will begin shipping on September 24. Intel says more than 20 OEMs will introduce 80 Lunar Lake laptop models that will be available at more than 30 global retailers.