Intel’s Next ‘AI PCs’ With Lunar Lake Chips Dial Back on Promising the AI Revolution
Intel claims x86 architecture isn’t done yet, not by a long shot. After months of offering dribs and drabs of CPU details, the recently beleaguered chipmaker shared info on its Lunar Lake lineup, now officially dubbed the Intel Core Ultra 200V. Intel first helped bring us the term “AI PC” less than a year ago with its Meteor Lake chips . Now, instead of hammering home the promise of NPU processing, its plan to regain mobile chip supremacy is to point out how annoyingly limited Qualcomm’s ARM-based chips can be.
Intel calls its Core Ultra 200V lineup the “most efficient x86” chips available. The key measurement is a claimed 40% reduction in PHY power compared to last year’s Meteor Lake. It should use between 41% and 33% less power on Microsoft Teams or YouTube. In some productivity tasks, the power efficiency may be even higher. Intel says its PCs got 20 hours of battery life in Procyon benchmarks compared to the Snapdragon X Elite, though the ARM-based PC of the same make still got 12.7 hours of life compared to a little more than 10 hours for the Lunar Lake setup.
There’s a wide selection of chips this time. The Lunar Lake lineup includes lower-power Intel Core Ultra 5 up to a top Core Ultra 9 288V. No matter what, you’re still getting a chip architecture that includes four efficiency cores and four power cores with eight threads. Besides power draw, the lower-end CPUs have a max frequency of 4.5 GHz with their P cores and an 8 MB cache. The Ultra 9 288V has a top 5.1 Ghz speed and a 12 MB cache. Unfortunately, there’s no Hyper-Threading integrated this time. Intel claims this leads to better power efficiency.
