Lunar Lake is still the Intel battery life king: ThinkPad T14 Gen 7 vs. T14 Gen 6

Back when Intel announced their 2026 Panther Lake CPU platform for laptops, there was one simple promise: Same efficiency as the older Lunar Lake series, but with a better performance. Lunar Lake was, thus far, Intel's most efficient laptop CPU, although limited in performance.

With more and more Panther Lake laptops coming to the market, and being actually available now, we are able to test this promise against reality. Indeed, Panther Lake does appear to be more efficient than the older Arrow Lake CPU series, but it appears Lunar Lake is still the CPU to beat when it comes to battery life.

We recently reviewed the new Lenovo ThinkPad T14 Gen 7. This Lenovo ThinkPad business laptop is powered by Panther Lake. In the case of our review unit, we were able to test the basic version with eight cores and an Intel Core Ultra 5 325, a comparable chip to Lunar Lake. In our testing, the system did well, as it achieved just over 18 hours in the Wi-Fi/websurfing test, at 150 cd/m² screen brightness.

However, it could not quite beat its predecessor. The older Lenovo ThinkPad T14 Gen 6 Intel with Lunar Lake ran over 19 hours in the same test - with a smaller 57 Wh battery to boot, as Lenovo uses a bigger 60 Wh battery in the T14 G7.

The bottom line is: Panther Lake does well when it comes to battery life, easily beating the AMD variant of the T14 Gen 6 - but even its smaller variants can not quite match the efficiency of Lunar Lake.