Intel Core Ultra 9 288V

The Intel Core Ultra 7 288V is the fastest Lunar Lake family processor as of Nov 2024 thanks to its higher TDP power target and higher clock speeds. This is an SoC for use in tablets and laptops of the slimmer kind that was unveiled in Autumn 2024. It sports 4 new Skymont E-cores and 4 new Lion Cove P-cores running at up to 3.7 GHz and 5.1 GHz respectively, along with the promising new Arc 140V iGPU and 32 GB of on-package, non-replaceable LPDDR5x-8533 RAM. A new 48 TOPS neural engine, Thunderbolt 4 and PCIe 5 SSD support are included as well. A vPro-enabled version of the CPU became available in early 2025.

Architecture and Features

Lunar Lake is built using the Foveros technology (stacking several dies on top of each other and next to each other), just like Meteor Lake was. The new chips make use of the enormous BGA2833 socket interface. Of the 8 cores, not a single one is Hyper-Threading-enabled which is the opposite of what AMD currently does with its Zen 5/5c chips.

Intel claims Lion Cove cores bring a 14% IPC improvement over Redwood Cove. For Skymont and Crestmont, the difference is much higher at 68%. Several tweaks and improvements are present here, such as the Low Latency Fabric that is supposed to make small data transfers between cores/caches a lot faster. The 288V has a very healthy 12 MB of level 3 cache; elsewhere, it has 4 PCIe 5 and 4 PCIe 4 lanes for connecting various kinds of devices, including NVMe SSDs at up to 15.75 GB/s. Thunderbolt 4 support is onboard by default, as is support for CNVi WiFi 7 + BT 5.4 cards from Intel. The 48 TOPS "AI Boost" neural engine is present along with technologies such as Threat Detection to make AI-enabled applications such as the Windows Defender more powerful.

Intel is predicted to get short of on-package RAM in subsequent CPU generations.

Performance

The 288V should be just a couple of percentage points faster than the Core Ultra 7 165U and Core i7-1360P in multi-threaded tasks.

Generally speaking, the 256V, 258V, 266V, 268V, 288V are faster than the 226V, 228V, 236V and 228V due to the difference in their last-level cache size (8 MB vs 12 MB) as well as clock speeds. However, the difference in performance between the slowest Lunar Lake chip, the 226V, and the fastest chip, the 288V is fairly small at around 10% to 15%. It depends on the TDP figures of the laptops being pitted against each other more than on anything else.

Graphics

The Arc Graphics 140V is here to replace the Arc 8 iGPU. Its 8 Xe² architecture "cores" run at up to 2,050 MHz and it also has 8 ray tracing units at its disposal. The adapter is DirectX 12 Ultimate-enabled and able to HW-decode a long list of popular video codecs such as h.266 VVC, h.265 HEVC, h.264 AVC, AV1 and VP9. Three SUHD 4320p monitors can be used simultaneously with this iGPU.

All 2023 and 2024 games are playable at 1080p on low graphics settings or higher with this iGPU. We got well over 30 fps in Ghost of Tsushima and almost 40 fps in Baldur's Gate 3. This means the Radeon 780M gets left behind while the Radeon 890M reigns supreme.

Power consumption

Unlike the slower 268V, 266V, 258V, 256V, 238V, 236V, 228V and 226V, this 2nd generation Core Ultra processor is supposed to consume 30 W when under long-term workloads rather than 17 W. The Intel-recommended short-term power limit for all of them is identical: 37 W.

Codename	Lunar Lake
Series	Intel Lunar Lake
Series: Lunar Lake Lunar Lake Intel Core Ultra 9 288V « 3.3 - 5.1 GHz 8 / 8  12 MB L3 Intel Core Ultra 7 268V 2.2 - 5 GHz 8 / 8  12 MB L3 Intel Core Ultra 7 266V 2.2 - 5 GHz 8 / 8  12 MB L3 Intel Core Ultra 7 258V 2.2 - 4.8 GHz 8 / 8  12 MB L3 Intel Core Ultra 7 256V 2.2 - 4.8 GHz 8 / 8  12 MB L3 Intel Core Ultra 5 238V 2.1 - 4.7 GHz 8 / 8  8 MB L3 Intel Core Ultra 5 236V 2.1 - 4.7 GHz 8 / 8  8 MB L3 Intel Core Ultra 5 228V 2.1 - 4.5 GHz 8 / 8  8 MB L3 Intel Core Ultra 5 226V 2.1 - 4.5 GHz 8 / 8  8 MB L3
Clock Rate	3300 - 5100 MHz
Level 1 Cache	1.4 MB
Level 2 Cache	14 MB
Level 3 Cache	12 MB
Number of Cores / Threads	8 / 8 4 x 5.1 GHz Intel Lion Cove P-core 4 x 3.7 GHz Intel Skymont E-core
Power Consumption (TDP = Thermal Design Power)	30 Watt
TDP Turbo PL2	37 Watt
Manufacturing Technology	3 nm
Max. Temperature	100 °C
Socket	BGA2833
Features	LPDDR5x-8533 RAM, PCIe 5 + PCIe 4, USB 4, AI Boost NPU (48 TOPS), Thread Director, PSE, Threat Detection, MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE4.1, SSE4.2, AES, AVX, AVX2, AVX-VNNi, FMA3, SHA
GPU	Intel Arc Graphics 140V ( - 2050 MHz)
64 Bit	64 Bit support
Architecture	x86
Announcement Date	09/03/2024
Product Link (external)	ark.intel.com

Benchmarks