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MagyarIFA 2024 | Core Ultra Series 2: With Lunar Lake, Intel introduces its most efficient x86 CPU yet
Roughly one year after announcing the Core Ultra Series 1, also known as Meteor Lake, Intel follows up with the second generation. Core Ultra Series 2 aka Lunar Lake was already introduced at June's Computex. At IFA, the final launch of the Core Ultra 200V series comes, for which Intel had one focus: Making x86 CPUs as efficient as possible.
Efficiency: Up to 50 percent lower power consumption than Meteor Lake
Of course, Intel had the same goal with Meteor Lake, the first architecture where Intel put Low Power E cores into the SoC tile. This was supposed to take off some load from the Compute tile and thus lower the power consumption. By now, it has become clear that this did not work out as planned. The Meteor Lake LP E cores were simply not fast enough, which meant that the Compute tile had to jump into action too often.
Lunar Lake is supposed to change this. There are no more E cores in the CPU tile here. Instead, Intel doubles the amount of E cores in the SoC tile to four. The new Skymont cores have much higher clock rates than the Crestmont cores of the predecessor, allowing Intel to keep the P cores in the Compute tile disabled for much longer. Alongside with other changes to the CPU design that are meant to save energy, Lunar Lake is much more efficient than before. Compared with Meteor Lake H, the power consumption is up to 50 percent lower, depending on the app.
Of course, it is not only the comparison with the preceding generation that interests us, but also the competition. Intel compared Lunar Lake with the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite and AMD Ryzen 9 AI HX 370, with almost identical laptops. Both in teams and the Procyon benchmark, Lunar Lake achieved a higher battery life than the competitors.
CPU: Lunar Lake with more performance per watt
A lower power consumption is not worth much if it comes at the cost of the performance. Lunar Lake is specifically made for the low power segment, which is why the CPU only has four big Lion Cove P cores (up to 5.1 GHz, plus 14 % IPC) and four small Skymont E cores (up to 3.7 GHz, plus 68 % IPC). Despite this, Lunar Lake beats out Meteor Lake chips, which have more cores and more threads thanks to hyperthreading; hyperthreading is disabled on Lunar Lake to lower the power consumption.
In the comparison with Meteor Lake U (14 threads), Lunar Lake with eight threads is 22 % faster according to Intel when consuming 9 W. Meteor Lake H with 22 threads at a power consumption of 17 W gets beaten by 10 percent. Only when the TDP is set at 23 W, the predecessor with more cores is faster by 6 percent. However, the power consumption of Lunar Lake includes the on Chip memory, which is not included in Meteor Lake.
It is obvious that Core Ultra 200V scales well up to 20 W, with competition winning above that value. Notable is that Intel says that Meteor Lake achieves performance parity with the Apple M3 at 20 W in terms of multicore performance.
GPU: Intel wants to make thin laptops gaming-capable
With Meteor Lake, there was a clear split in the lineup in terms of GPU performance. The H series with Intel ARC was in the spotlight, while the U series with its halved Intel Graphics was more in the background. With Core Ultra Series 2, Intel delivers a product with a similar power consumption to the U series, but a Xe2 GPU that is still supposed to beat the ARC GPU of the Meteor Lake H series. On average, the Intel ARC 140V with eight ARC cores beats the old Intel ARC graphics of Meteor Lake by 31 percent.
Compared with the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite, which actually could not run many games, performance was better by 68 % in Intel's testing. When put up against the AMD Ryzen AI 9 370 HX, Lunar Lake still had an advantage, although a smaller one of 16 percent.
AI: Up to 120 TOPS, Copilot+ ready
Meteor Lake was the first Intel CPU to contain an NPU. However, this was still a weak model that could only reach up to 11.5 TOPS of NPU performance - not nearly enough for Microsoft's new Copilot+ standard. With Lunar Lake, Intel catches up to the competition, as the NPU can deliver 40 to 48 TOPS, making Lunar Lake Copilot+ ready.
Nine Core Ultra 200V CPUs launching on the 24th of September
In total, there are nine different CPUs of the Core Ultra Series 2, which will launch in late September. Up to 80 laptop designs are going to be available with Lunar Lake. There are four Core Ultra 5 options, four Ultra 7 models and one Ultra 9. All CPUs have eight cores. The difference between the SKUs is primarily defined by the clock rates. The Ultra 5 chips also only have 8 instead of 12 MB cache, a weaker GPU (Intel ARC 130V) with seven ARC cores and a weaker NPU. The Core Ultra 9 offers the best performance in all aspects - CPU, GPU, NPU. There are two versions of every chip, with either 16 or 32 GB of on chip RAM. Only the Ultra 9 always offers 32 GB. The TDP fluctuates between 8 and 37 W with 17 W as the typical power limit. The Core Ultra 9 is the only one with a different TDP, which ranges from 17 to 37 W.
Verdict: Intel might be competitive again in the low power segment
The development of Intel's CPUs only knew a single direction for years: More performance, higher power consumption. With Meteor Lake, Intel tried to break with this trend first, but the real breakthrough seems to be Lunar Lake - if the platform delivers as Intel promises.
The new CPU and GPU architecture, combined with TSMC's N3 process node, seems to give Intel the performance boost it sorely needed. Especially, the U CPUs have not been competitive for a long time, as Intel CPUs pretty much had to consume 30 W or more to be competitive. For the Core Ultra 200V, things are different, as the new chips have their strengths between 10 and 20 W. This will likely help Intel especially with thin and light laptops and may even enable fanless designs with x86 CPUs. Gaming handhelds could also profit from the better efficiency and better performance of the Lunar Lake iGPU.
Certainly, those are not all parts of the PC market. It remains to be seen how and when Intel will bring the advantages of the Lunar Lake platform to bigger laptops and desktops. This leads us over to Arrow Lake, the new mainstream CPU platform from Intel. With the economic problems that Intel has at the moment, Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake may be a make-or-break moment for the company.
Source(s)
Intel
