‘Lunar Lake’ Leaves the Launch Pad: Intel Unveils Core Ultra 2 Laptop Chips at IFA

BERLIN—The long version of Intel’s pitch for its new Core Ultra 2 laptop processors involves charts and graphs of “P-Cores” and “E-Cores,” and an array of benchmarking results. The short version amounts to this: lower odds of you looking nervously around the room for a power outlet as your laptop drops below a 10% charge level.

And, Intel says, this advance in battery life will come coupled with performance upgrades—the sort of “Why not both?” message that Qualcomm had for its unveiling of Snapdragon X Elite last October. And that Apple rolled out for its April 2021 introduction of computers with its first Apple Silicon chips.

“This is a very special CPU,” said Robert Hallock, vice president of Intel’s client computing group and general manager for AI technical marketing, during an event Intel hosted here on Tuesday, in advance of the 2024 IFA tech trade show. 

(Credit: Rob Pegoraro)

Core Ultra 2, also known by its development moniker of “Lunar Lake,” makes all that happen with a host of design changes from the previous “Meteor Lake” architecture. These updates include expanding the number of efficiency-optimized cores (E-Cores) in the processor’s special low-power zone from two to four; ditching Hyper-Threading in the four power-optimized P-Cores to reduce their power draw; packaging up to 32GB of main system memory into the processor die itself; and reducing latency between those components. (For much more on what makes Lunar Lake tick, see my colleague John Burek’s extensive writeup of Intel’s June introduction of this processor architecture in Taipei.)

The Big Pitch: Taking Shots at Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X

Intel’s message Tuesday to computer buyers who have been eyeing laptops powered by Snapdragon X because of their outstanding battery life and speedy performance, especially with apps rewritten for their ARM-based architecture? Think again.

“We’re beating Snapdragon on performance per watt by about 20%,” Hallock said. 

Here’s what’s in the Core Ultra 2 package. (Credit: Intel)

He showed off a series of charts showing Lunar Lake-powered laptops erasing the battery life and performance advantages of Snapdragon X Elite-powered machines from the same vendors with the same specifications and components (outside of the processor and motherboard). 

(Credit: Intel)

(Credit: Intel)

For example, a test with the UL Procyon Office Productivity benchmark showed a laptop from an unspecified manufacturer with a Lunar Lake Core Ultra 7 268V processor lasting 20.1 hours, versus 18.4 hours for the same chassis but with a Qualcomm X1E-80-100 processor. 

(Credit: Rob Pegoraro)

(Intel didn’t win a test with a benchmark of Microsoft Teams video calling, with the Lunar Lake laptop running 10.7 hours and the Snapdragon X Elite machine lasting 12.7 hours. Hallock’s quip: “I’m actually super-okay about not being on a Teams call for 12 hours.”)

Much of Intel’s presentation emphasized a continuing issue with Qualcomm developing chips on the same ARM foundation that Apple used to develop Apple Silicon: Some software, including many game titles, doesn’t run on Snapdragon X Elite chips at all.

A series of slides showing frame rates across 45 games brought that home, showing Lunar Lake delivering a 31% improvement in frames per second over Meteor Lake and 16% over AMD’s Ryzen AI HX 370. The figure relative to Snapdragon X Elite was 68%, except that only reflected the 22 of those 45 games that ran on this processor.

“More than half Did. Not. Run. On Snapdragon,” said Hallock, pausing for emphasis.

(Credit: Intel)

Apple Silicon, however, didn’t show up in any of these comparisons—or in those conducted on test laptops in demonstration rooms after the presentation—aside from a single appearance of the M3 processor in a graph comparing power usage for multi-threaded compute, in which that chip sat in the middle of the pack.

AI TOPS: Here Comes the Next NPU Skirmish

AI figured heavily in the presentation as well, with speakers and slides touting how Lunar Lake’s CPU, NPU, and GPU each deliver performance that developers can easily exploit.

“We are twice the performance of AMD and, once again, Qualcomm can’t do it,” Hallock said, chuckling before the last four words. “In every data type and in every engine, we are both faster than Qualcomm and AMD.”

(Credit: Intel)

Carla Rodríguez, vice president of Intel’s client computing group and general manager for client software enabling, brought up a trio of software executives to offer their own testimonials. One, Eric Shulze, Trend Micro product-management VP, highlighted a less obvious benefit of AI: By allowing complex tasks to be done on-device instead of in the cloud, that security firm doesn’t need to scare customers with privacy notices.

“We used to do some scanning in the cloud, and to do that, we had to prompt the user with a data-collection notice,” he said, referring to the EU’s vast GDPR privacy rules. Now that data never leaves the laptop, and he expects far more people will opt into that scanning.

The Core Ultra 2 Processor Lineup

In addition to the Lunar Lake architecture, the nine different Core Ultra 2 processors will integrate Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4 and Thunderbolt 4 connectivity. Intel further plans to update its Evo laptop-quality initiative it launched in 2020 to add an updated Evo edition highlighting Core Ultra 2-specific benefits. 

(Credit: Intel)

The CPU lineup will comprise nine initial models, as follows…

(Credit: Intel)

According to Intel, the new “V” at the end of the chip names is of no particular significance; it supersedes the usual U, H, HX, and P nomenclature in this new line.

Laptop manufacturers will start taking preorders for Lunar Lake machines today, with hardware availability on Sept. 24. A slide in the presentation listed all of the usual suspects, among them Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, LG, MSI, and Samsung.

(Credit: Intel)

We’ll have to see about prices—which have been a weak point so far among Snapdragon X Elite laptops, with the cheapest existing models starting at $999—but Intel did confirm coming machines will include the sort of convertible laptops with 360-degree hinges that were absent from the initial lineup of laptops with Qualcomm’s X Elite and X Plus processors.

With Lunar Lake, Intel is talking a bigger-than-usual game. Can the company pull it off? Speaking after the presentation, Anshel Sag, a Moor Insights & Strategy analyst, voiced tentative confidence, especially about support from manufacturers.

(Credit: Rob Pegoraro)

“This is easily one of the best showings I’ve seen for a new platform, in terms of OEMs showing designs ready to go,” he said. He also credited Intel for not just sitting on its legacy advantage of software compatibility but making “a significant investment in AI from the get-go.”

But Apple and Qualcomm also deserve some credit for forcing Intel to up its game faster than it might have otherwise.  

“I can tell you definitely, we would not have this in the time frame that we have today,” he said. “It was quite clear that Intel had to move up timelines, and they have.”

About Rob Pegoraro

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Rob Pegoraro writes about interesting problems and possibilities in computers, gadgets, apps, services, telecom, and other things that beep or blink. He’s covered such developments as the evolution of the cell phone from 1G to 5G, the fall and rise of Apple, Google’s growth from obscure Yahoo rival to verb status, and the transformation of social media from CompuServe forums to Facebook’s billions of users. Pegoraro has met most of the founders of the internet and once received a single-word email reply from Steve Jobs.

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