Intel’s new Core Ultra 200-series processors, known as Lunar Lake, are a mix of impressive and slightly embarrassing achievements.
The processors are noteworthy for their decent performance, even with some setbacks and inconsistencies, and for significantly enhancing Intel’s battery life. This improvement comes at a crucial time as Intel faces competition from Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon X Elite and AMD’s Ryzen AI chips. Additionally, Lunar Lake is set to be the first Intel processor that fulfills Microsoft’s performance criteria for the Copilot+ features in Windows 11.
However, it’s somewhat humiliating for Intel that achieving this competitive edge required the use of another company’s production facilities.
Intel describes this situation as a temporary hiccup, a mere preparation phase as it gears up its forthcoming 18A manufacturing process to take production back in-house. Yet, given Intel’s history of production delays and the early signs of trouble with the 18A process, it’s hard to take such timelines at face value. Moreover, Intel’s move to outsource its chip production comes at a time when it’s actively trying to attract other chip makers to use its manufacturing services.
This article reviews Intel’s latest mobile processor, housed in an Asus Zenbook UX5406S equipped with a Core Ultra 7 258V from Intel. This review will focus primarily on the chip’s performance and its worthiness for purchase, despite the broader context of Intel’s manufacturing challenges possibly influencing the overall evaluation.
Exploring Lunar Lake
A brief overview of Lunar Lake’s structure is in order.
Lunar Lake, like last year’s Meteor Lake-based Core Ultra 100 series, is built using Intel’s Foveros technology, which integrates various chiplets. In the case of Meteor Lake, Intel fabricated the main CPU cores compute tile, while TSMC handled the graphics, I/O, and other functionalities. With Lunar Lake, the CPU, GPU, and NPU are consolidated into a single compute tile, with the platform controller tile (also known as the Platform Controller Hub or PCH in past CPUs) managing I/O and other functions. The design also includes a “filler tile” purely to maintain a rectangular shape. This time, both the compute and platform controller tiles are made by TSMC.
Intel continues to use a mix of power-efficient E-cores and high-performance P-cores for its CPU design, although the total core count has decreased compared to both the previous generation of Core Ultra chips and older 12th- and 13th-generation Core processors.
Lunar Lake features four E-cores and four P-cores, a setup commonly seen in Apple’s M-series processors but new to Intel. For comparison, the Meteor Lake Core Ultra 7 155H included six P-cores and 10 E-cores, while a Core i7-1255U had two P-cores and eight E-cores. Hyperthreading has been removed from the P-core architecture, with Intel claiming that the space on the silicon is better utilized to enhance single-core performance. This change is expected to improve Lunar Lake’s single-core output while potentially reducing its multi-core capability, as we’ll discuss in the performance section.
Intel is also introducing a new GPU architecture with Lunar Lake, known as Battlemage, which will also be used in upcoming standalone Arc desktop GPUs—if they are released (Intel has been quiet about this amid various project cancellations). The integrated Arc 140V GPU is reported to be about 31 percent faster than its Meteor Lake predecessor in gaming, and 16 percent faster than AMD’s latest Radeon 890M, although results can vary based on the game. The Arc 130V GPU features one less Xe core and operates at reduced clock speeds.
The neural processing unit (NPU), another component of Lunar Lake, handles AI and machine-learning tasks locally, which could otherwise be processed in the cloud. While Windows and most applications don’t yet fully utilize these capabilities, the NPU in Lunar Lake is rated to perform between 40 and 48 trillion operations per second (TOPS), fulfilling or even surpassing Microsoft’s 40 TOPS requirement and marking a significant improvement over the 11.5 TOPS NPU in Meteor Lake.
A significant innovation in these Core Ultra chips is the integration of RAM directly into the CPU package, a method also utilized by Apple in its silicon chips. Lunar Lake processors come with either 16GB or 32GB of RAM, with specific models offering different capacities (in the chips announced so far, model numbers ending in 8, like the Core Ultra 7 258V, include 32GB, and those ending in 6 have 16GB). This integration not only saves space on the motherboard but also reduces power consumption by shortening the distance data must travel.
It seems likely that Intel will release other Core Ultra 200-series models with more CPU cores and external memory options, as the company probably won’t abandon the high-performance, high-margin laptop processor market. These models would need to compete with AMD’s top-tier performance and offer additional RAM. However, such releases have not been announced by Intel as of yet.
I am Sofia, a tech-savvy journalist and passionate member of the “Jason Deegan” team. Growing up, I was always fascinated by the latest technological advancements and loved sharing my knowledge with others.