Review: Intel Lunar Lake CPUs combine good battery life and x86 compatibility

By: ARS Techica - Tech Posted On: September 25, 2024 View: 1

This article was originally published on ARS Techica - Tech. You can read the original article HERE

An Asus Zenbook UX5406S with a Lunar Lake-based Core Ultra 7 258V inside.

Andrew Cunningham
These high-end Zenbooks usually offer pretty good keyboards and trackpads, and the ones here are comfortable and reliable.

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An HDMI port, a pair of Thunderbolt ports, and a headphone jack.

Andrew Cunningham
A single USB-A port on the other side of the laptop. Dongles are fine, but we still appreciate when thin-and-light laptops can fit one of these in.

Andrew Cunningham

Two things can be true for Intel's new Core Ultra 200-series processors, codenamed Lunar Lake: They can be both impressive and embarrassing.

Impressive because they perform reasonably well, despite some regressions and inconsistencies, and because they give Intel's battery life a much-needed boost as the company competes with new Snapdragon X Elite processors from Qualcomm and Ryzen AI chips from AMD. It will also be Intel's first chip to meet Microsoft's performance requirements for the Copilot+ features in Windows 11.

Embarrassing because, to get here, Intel had to use another company's manufacturing facilities to produce a competitive chip.

Intel claims that this is a temporary arrangement, just a bump in the road as the company prepares to scale up its upcoming 18A manufacturing process so it can bring its own chip production back in-house. And maybe that's true! But years of manufacturing misfires (and early reports of troubles with 18A) have made me reflexively skeptical of any timelines the company gives for its manufacturing operations. And Intel has outsourced some of its manufacturing at the same time it is desperately trying to get other chip designers to manufacture their products in Intel's factories.

This is a review of Intel's newest mobile silicon by way of an Asus Zenbook UX5406S provided by Intel, not a chronicle of Intel's manufacturing decline and ongoing financial woes. I will mostly focus on telling you whether the chip performs well and whether you should buy it. But it's a rare situation, where whether it's a solid chip is not a slam-dunk win for Intel, which might factor into our overall analysis.

About Lunar Lake

Enlarge / A high-level breakdown of Intel's next-gen Lunar Lake chips, which preserve some of Meteor Lake's changes while reverting others.
Intel

Let's talk about the composition of Lunar Lake, in brief.

Like last year's Meteor Lake-based Core Ultra 100 chips, Lunar Lake is a collection of chiplets stitched together via Intel's Foveros technology. In Meteor Lake, Intel used this to combine several silicon dies manufactured by different companies—Intel made the compute tile where the main CPU cores were housed, while TSMC made the tiles for graphics, I/O, and other functions.

In Lunar Lake, Intel is still using Foveros—basically, using a silicon "base tile" as an interposer that enables communication between the different chiplets—to put the chips together. But the CPU, GPU, and NPU have been reunited in a single compute tile, and I/O and other functions are all handled by the platform controller tile (sometimes called the Platform Controller Hub or PCH in previous Intel CPUs). There's also a "filler tile" that exists only so that the end product is rectangular. Both the compute tile and the platform controller tile are made by TSMC this time around.

Intel is still splitting its CPU cores between power-efficient E-cores and high-efficiency P-cores, but core counts overall are down relative to both previous-generation Core Ultra chips and older 12th- and 13th-generation Core chips.

Enlarge / Some high-level details of Intel's new E- and P-core architectures.
Intel

Lunar Lake has four E-cores and four P-cores, a composition common for Apple's M-series chips but not, so far, for Intel's. The Meteor Lake Core Ultra 7 155H, for example, included six P-cores and a total of 10 E-cores. A Core i7-1255U included two P-cores and eight E-cores. Intel has also removed Hyperthreading from the CPU architecture it's using for its P-cores, claiming that the silicon space was better spent on improving single-core performance. You'd expect this to boost Lunar Lake's single-core performance and hurt its multi-core performance relative to past generations, and to spoil our performance section a bit, that's basically what happens, though not by as much as you might expect.

Intel is also shipping a new GPU architecture with Lunar Lake, codenamed Battlemage—it will also power the next wave of dedicated desktop Arc GPUs, when and if we get them (Intel hasn't said anything on that front, but it's canceling or passing off a lot of its side projects lately). It has said that the Arc 140V integrated GPU is an average of 31 percent faster than the old Meteor Lake Arc GPU in games, and 16 percent faster than AMD's newest Radeon 980M, though performance will vary widely based on the game. The Arc 130V GPU has one less of Intel's Xe cores (7, instead of 8) and lower clock speeds.

The last piece of the compute puzzle is the neural processing unit (NPU), which can process some AI and machine-learning workloads locally rather than sending them to the cloud. Windows and most apps still aren't doing much with these, but Intel does rate the Lunar Lake NPUs at between 40 and 48 trillion operations per second (TOPS) depending on the chip you're buying, meeting or exceeding Microsoft's 40 TOPS requirement and generally around four times faster than the NPU in Meteor Lake (11.5 TOPS).

Enlarge / Intel is shifting to on-package RAM for Meteor Lake, something Apple also uses for its M-series chips.
Intel

And there's one last big change: For these particular Core Ultra chips, Intel is integrating the RAM into the CPU package, rather than letting PC makers solder it to the motherboard separately or offer DIMM slots—again, something we see in Apple Silicon chips in the Mac. Lunar Lake chips ship with either 16GB or 32GB of RAM, and most of the variants can be had with either amount (in the chips Intel has announced so far, model numbers ending in 8 have 32GB, and model numbers ending in 6 have 16GB). Packaging memory this way both saves motherboard space and, according to Intel, reduces power usage, because it shortens the physical distance that data needs to travel.

I am reasonably confident that we'll see other Lunar Lake variants with more CPU cores and external memory—I don't see Intel giving up on high-performance, high-margin laptop processors, and those chips will need to compete with AMD's high-end performance and offer additional RAM. But if those chips are coming, Intel hasn't announced them yet.

Come for the battery life, if not for the speed

Enlarge / The Asus Zenbook UX5406S. I do like the geometric pattern on the lids of recent Zenbooks, which are more interesting to look at than the company logo you see on most laptop lids.

Andrew Cunningham

The biggest argument in favor of buying one of the Arm-based Snapdragon X Pro or X Elite laptops, and for putting up with Windows-on-Arm's lingering app and hardware compatibility issues, is battery life. It has been a key selling point for Apple Silicon Macs, too, which saw huge battery life boosts after dumping Intel's chips and using its own. So what Intel needs to do with Lunar Lake—and, I suspect, a key reason for the reduction in ridiculous core counts and building the chips at TSMC—is prove that it can still come within range of an Arm laptop's battery life without falling too far behind in performance.

The good news is that Lunar Lake's battery life, at least in this Zenbook, is quite good. It lasted for around 16.5 hours on a single charge in the PCMark Modern Office battery-life test, compared to just over 12 hours for a similarly configured Core Ultra 7 155H Zenbook UX3405M and a bit over nine hours for a larger Zenbook UM5606W with a Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 in it. You'd need to go all the way back to Intel's 11th-generation Core processors—the first generation to use Intel's 10 nm/Intel 7 manufacturing process exclusively, and the last generation before core counts exploded—to find laptops with similar battery life, at least in our testing.

PCMark doesn't run on Arm-based systems, but in day-to-day use, I'd say the Lunar Lake Zenbook felt pretty similar overall to the M1 and M3 MacBook Airs I've used and the 15-inch Surface Laptop we reviewed a couple of months ago: appreciably better than other recent Intel systems, and good enough that I could unplug the laptop in the morning, work a full day, poke around on the computer more in the evening, and still not need to plug in until midmorning or early afternoon the next day.

Andrew Cunningham
Andrew Cunningham
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Andrew Cunningham

As for performance, it's... mostly fine. It meaningfully improves on Meteor Lake's single-core CPU performance, where it is within range of the Snapdragon X Elite and Ryzen AI 9 HX 370. Unfortunately, its multi-core CPU performance, while not dramatically worse than Meteor Lake's, falls short of Qualcomm and AMD's best here and is actually slower than 12th- and 13th-generation Core CPUs.

This is especially true when using the "Standard" performance profile, which benchmarked quite a bit slower in multi-core benchmarks and games than the "Performance" profile. We tested both; the performance numbers in the charts are mostly done in Performance mode, and the battery tests were run in Standard mode with the screen set to its default 120 Hz refresh rate. And note that, unlike many other laptops, Asus doesn't let the built-in Windows power profiles dictate these performance settings—you need to change them in the MyAsus app. Changing Windows' power profile from "Balanced" to "Best Performance" has no effect on benchmarks that we could measure.

In our benchmarks, it performs a lot like Apple's M2, which is still relevant since it powers the entry-level MacBook Air, but which is nevertheless more than two years old at this point. Still, Lunar Lake should stand up reasonably well to lower-end Snapdragons and (when they exist) Ryzen AI processors and should still be an upgrade for anyone coming from a 3- to 5-year-old system.

Graphics performance generally improves with Lunar Lake, though there are inconsistencies that suggest Intel has room to improve its drivers for its new architecture (first-generation Arc GPUs, likewise, launched with drivers that held the hardware back a bit).

Andrew Cunningham
Andrew Cunningham
Andrew Cunningham
Andrew Cunningham
Andrew Cunningham

In the Geekbench 6 Compute benchmark and the GFXBench DirectX 12 benchmarks, Lunar Lake's Arc 140V GPU runs about as fast as the one in Meteor Lake or even falls behind a little. In the 3DMark benchmarks, the Arc 140V is ahead more consistently, and this is where Intel manages to match or beat AMD and Qualcomm's GPU performance (in the one 3DMark benchmark that actually runs on Arm systems, anyway—it's difficult to compare GPU performance between these platforms because games running on Arm will also be dealing with the overhead of x86-to-Arm translation).

Tom's Hardware ran some additional game benchmarks and found a similar pattern overall—some anomalous results where the Arc 140V performs similarly to or worse than its predecessor and others where it's out ahead of the Meteor Lake GPU and AMD's Radeon 890M. It definitely seems like AMD's GPU is the one to stick with if you're after reliably good integrated graphics performance, but Intel does have some room to improve over time.

Andrew Cunningham
Andrew Cunningham
Andrew Cunningham

Lunar Lake's power efficiency is also pretty good, though the exact numbers will vary a bit depending on how your specific laptop's manufacturer has configured the power settings. In our multicore Handbrake video encoding test, Lunar Lake ran behind everything from recent Ryzens to 12th-gen Intel chips, to say nothing of Apple’s M3. But in Standard performance mode, its power usage was low enough that it used less power overall to do the same work. Performance mode wasn’t quite as efficient, but it improved performance enough to bring the Core Ultra 7 288V closer to the Core Ultra 7 155H, despite the older chip’s much higher number of CPU cores.

It checks the boxes

Enlarge / An Asus Zenbook UX5406S with a Core Ultra 7 258V inside.

Lunar Lake isn't a slam dunk for Intel, even before you consider what the chips say about the current state of the company; battery life is good, but performance is merely "good enough" and isn't always an improvement over previous-generation products.

Still, I see Lunar Lake as a welcome course correction from the 12th- and 13th-generation Core CPUs and first-gen Core Ultra CPUs, which boosted core counts and multi-core performance beyond what most thin-and-light laptop users actually need—and at the expense of battery life. Ryzen AI offers better CPU performance than Lunar Lake and more consistent graphics performance but didn't have the same battery life; Qualcomm's chips can offer better CPU performance and good battery life, but with a few remaining Windows-on-Arm teething problems. Intel is offering a balance of performance, efficiency, and compatibility that's especially compelling if you're upgrading from something with an 11th-gen-or-older Core processor in it.

It does remain frustrating that there's nothing on the PC side that can replicate Apple Silicon's combination of leading performance, leading power efficiency, and good software compatibility (though that last one comes more from the control Apple exerts on its own ecosystem). But unlike recent Intel processor generations or the Snapdragon X Elite, Lunar Lake is a good choice for thin-and-light laptop buyers who just don't want to have to think about their computers all that much.

It performs well enough to do the kinds of browsing and productivity work most people are doing, it will play the occasional game, and it lasts a long time on a charge. It will do the Copilot+ stuff, if you care about it, when Microsoft starts shipping those features for x86 PCs. "A safe default choice" isn't super inspiring, but it's kind of what Intel needs right now while it tries to straighten itself out.

The good

Improved single-core performance relative to last-gen CPUs.
Multi-core performance is down, but not by as much as you'd expect given the reduction in core counts and removal of Hyperthreading.
Excellent battery life and power efficiency.
Good combination of battery life, performance, and software compatibility.

The bad

GPU performance is kind of all over the place. Maybe drivers can fix that, and maybe not.
Reduced multi-core performance year over year.
Can't catch up with performance of AMD, Qualcomm, or Apple's offerings in this product category.

The ugly

What these chips say about the current state of Intel.

Listing image by Andrew Cunningham

This article was originally published by ARS Techica - Tech. We only curate news from sources that align with the core values of our intended conservative audience. If you like the news you read here we encourage you to utilize the original sources for even more great news and opinions you can trust!

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