Tested Intel s Lunar Lake wants you to forget Qualcomm laptops exist PCWorld

Tested: Intel’s Lunar Lake wants you to forget Qualcomm laptops exist

Great battery life, average performance, amazing intelligent gaming: that's Intel's Lunar Lake chips.

PCWORLD Senior Editor September 24, 2024 6:00 AM PDT Image: Mark Khachman / IDG

Lunar Lake - Intel Snapdragon killer.

Intel Core Ultra Series 2 (Lunar Lake) was purposely developed with an emphasis on low power consumption. It has been somewhat successful in this regard, but the Core Ultra 7 258V chip I tested is still capable of borrowing second or third place space when compared to AMD's Ryzen mobile microprocessors. But Lunar Lake is not bad by any stretch of the imagination, with battery life comparable to Snapdragon and a powerful integrated GPU, ensuring the talent to handle yesterday's best games.

Intel provided us with a Lunar Lake-equipped Asus Zenbook S14 laptop, and we spent the last week or so testing it here to answer this question: Which of the AMD Ryzen AI 300 microprocessors, Intel Lunar Lake, and Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite is considered the best microprocessor for laptops in 2024? And how does Lunar Lake stand out from its predecessor, Meteor Lake?

We ran all three chips through a series of benchmarks, a common test when on with a network and when food from the battery. We believe that the most basic noble for you is the greatest potential for productivity from these laptop microprocessors, and also how much of a performance hit is taken to keep your laptop performing when you turn off the network.

Intel unveiled Lunar Lake at the Computex 2024 exhibition in Taiwan, where the company's instructions promised "uncompromising opportunities." The Asus Zenbook S14 and other Lunar Lake and Ryzen AI 300 laptops are currently listed as Copilot+, but a Windows update to connect their features of the artificial origin of the mind will only appear in October.

Adam Patrick Murray / IDG

How we tested Intel’s Lunar Lake

This review uses benchmarks compiled by me, my colleague Gordon Ma Wun, and other PCWORLD laptops according to this and previous test results. We will focus on the three main chips of this generation: Intel's Core Ultra Series 2/Lunar Lake, Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite, and AMD Ryzen AI 300, and sometimes add discontinued microprocessors such as Core Ultra Series 1/Meteor Lake microprocessors to help with context.

I will try to attribute what it is actually connected by analysis, therefore it is important and how the results will affect the right laptop you get. If you want to get even more information, check out Gordon's video (below) on Lunar Lake, which has extensive benchmarks and testing:

The laptops provided by Intel and ASUS are equipped with Core Ultra 7 258V chips. This chip is a bit unusual because it is located almost in the center of the Core Ultra series 2 chip issued by Intel, and that Intel does not give us the best chips for comparative testing. Instead, the Ultra 7 258V connects four hig h-productivity core, four low power consumption core, and 4, 8GHz turboyadro as needed. If there is a problem with the communal processing, only 8 jets can be used.

It is good that Intel and ASUS are used every day for similar laptops to compare chips, especially asus Zenbook 14 OLED, Lunar Lake Microprocessor and previous generation Meteor Lake. Later, including the core ultra, and will be described later, AMD used ASUS Zenbook S 16 as a debut platform for Ryzen AI 300. In fact, like Quarcom, but I evaluated Microsoft Surface Pro 1 1-Edition, I took Surface Laptop 7-Edition Gordon and executed a certain number of additional benchmar. This is a more correct comparison of Quarcom. For some benchmarks for logistics, I used MSI Prestige 16 AI Evo with similar meteor chips inside.

Lunar Lake tested: CPU performance

All test devices were tested on two synthetic benchmarks: Cinebench R23 and Cinebench 2024. Both tests use laptop microcessors at the starting point, use all inexpensive processing jets, and then use only one stream. The difference between R23 and Cinebench 2024 is that while the latter contains a special version for ARM, the R23 version is launched through Snapdragon software, which converts the X86 emulator into an ARM code.

You can pay attention to the two phases here: When coding under your arm, the performance of Snapdragon is important and is pushed up to your favorite. This increases the evaluation of Lunar Lake (Ultra 7 258V). However, you can see that the aging Meteor Lake (155H) is better than the new Inteltip. This indicates that Intel is not a performance but an autonomous work ahead of the times.

According to the same Macworld, MacBook Pro, and MacBook Air 15 with Apple, the results of MacBook Pro and 658 points of mult i-flows have been proven. In fact, in terms of singl e-core performance, both platforms reached 141 points. In fact, it is likely to be an example of Intel Lunar Lake, but it is not the same performance.

Mark Kutchman / IDG

Note: I do my research using the usual performance options provided by the laptop manufacturer, for example. That is, the Snapdragon study used Microsoft's "recommended" (lowest) option, and the Lunar Lake study used the "balanced" or average option. However, I still test the chips in performance mode. In this case, I used the Windows options for best performance and set the Asus laptop specs. Sometimes you can encounter battery performance characteristics that outperform the mains. This may have to do with statistical anomalies, but it can and does happen. We looked at this in our Snapdragon and Meteor Lake studies.

If you want Snapdragon performance options, my Surface Pro (11th edition) has it covered (I didn't try the "max" option for battery).

I'm not considered a big fan of the Geekbench suite, simply because it runs in the background without really showing what it's preparing as a real workload. But it does this quickly, so it's a familiar analysis. There is also an Arm-only version, which is a nice touch for the Surface Laptop 7th Edition. I ranked the total all-in-one multi-threaded microprocessor test and placed the power delivery analysis just above the battery-powered test for comparison.

One of the strong aspects of the Snapdragon is how smoothly it runs both on battery and on the mains. Geekbench again shows how quickly the battery performance of Lunar Lake degrades. Geekbench also shows how quickly the battery performance of Lunar Lake degrades, but it also notes the outstanding performance of the integrated GPU. The difference is that AMD's Ryzen continues to guarantee top performance.

Mark Kutchman / IDG

I decided to use Procyon's Office Productivity benchmark again this time. I like the wide range of applications in PCMark 10 (from desktop to CAD to video call simulation), but the Arm microprocessor would not be able to handle every single one of the studies. These office studies are still considered legitimate, and show how well the laptop chips perform with Microsoft Office, including Outlook, with real-world applications implemented.

For better or worse, the difference between different platforms is small. But look at the performance drop on battery power for Core Ultra/Lunar Lake 258V!

Mark Kutchman / IDG

One of the realities of lane work is the fact that you do "work" every day: Looking at the Internet page, pause, send electric messages, drink coffee, or call. Check the machine ... Laptops are often idle. However, when requesting an application, the latest generation mobile microcessors are not easy.

In recent research on AMD Ryzen AI 300, we changed the handbrake analysis and made it more active. In the case of han d-braking transcode s-provided, the locked initial code and the tears of the steel cinem a-and this is a process that requires enormous calculation costs. How perfect the laptop cools here, but the battery is the same: to perform this test, it has the ability to stop within one hour, including reliable batteries. , It has the ability to disappoint you. Before the battery ignited, I failed three of these tests together, and this is within three hours of endless work.

But again, Intel's new development ... will complete the last one. This is, for example, an actual application that you can load it yourself, and this is actually an important analysis. Lunar Lake took almost 17 minutes. Ryzen to complete the task.

Mark Khachman / IDG

Mark Kutchman / IDG

Lunar Lake tested: Graphics and AI performance

Given the historical strength of AMD in the graphics microcessesa, the resurrection of Intel is somewhat impressive. However, in two surveys, the old benchmark "Time Spy" for board games and mobile games, and the alternative sample "Nomad Light", Intel Lunar Lake shines.

Mark Khachman / IDG

Mark Kutchman / IDG

Here, all three mobile platforms are near a friend's friend, probably shows that all three are actually suitable for this task ... but is suitable for battery work. do not have. According to the PugetBench website, the AMD RYZEN 7 7800X3D table system with GeForce RTX 3080 is 9. Intel Core i9-14900HX and GeForce RTX 4090 MSI Raider equipped The top top is 9. 959 points. 4. 549 desktop computers combining Intel Core i7-9750H and GeForce GTX 1660 TI.

Mark Khachman / IDG

Mark Kutchman / IDG

Normally, 60 workers per second is the minimum for gameplay - if it's less, the game has the potential to stutter. So we tested Shadow of the Tomb Raider at 1080p, low options. And what did we find? The game looks and runs pretty good. All game research was done with the network turned off.

Mark Khachman / IDG

Mark Kutchman / IDG

Instead, Cyberpunk invites resolution scaling in XESS, where combined with the window option and performance mode laptops, the worker recall frequency can reach within 65 workers per second, but with a cool boot, at the beginning of the day I saw 69 workers per second.

Mark Khachman / IDG

Mark Kutchman / IDG

The UL Procyon application tests each chip to determine the performance of the artificial origin of the mind and how perfectly it cools with different mechanisms of the artificial origin of the mind. As with Cinebench Studies and 3Dmark, it is possible to collectively get an idea of how perfectly the chip can function AI.

Mark Kaufman / IDG

Mark Kutchman / IDG

The test uses an 8-bit integer model, which generates images that are less difficult than the floating-point model. However, the combined work of the NPU and iGPU is 8 images per image, which is still too slow. It's fast, under a second. Here we compare the Procyon results.

Mark Hackman/IDG

Mark Kutchman / IDG

Lunar Lake tested: Battery-life performance

Asus ZenBook S 16 (with Ryzen AI 300 chip, 78Wh battery), 13, 8-inch Surface Laptop 7th Edition (Snapdragon We have previous studies of the Asus ZenBook 14 OLED (with the 1st generation Core Ultra X Elite chip, 54Wh battery), the Asus ZenBook 14 OLED (with the 1st generation Core Ultra Core 155H, 75Wh battery), and the current Asus ZenBook OLED (with the Lunar Lake chip, 73Wh battery).

Lately, I've been having fun running my usual video tests on these laptops, which involve playing a 4K video over and over again with fixed screen brightness until the laptop's battery dies. The Lunar Lake laptop lasted 21 hours! This is literally the equivalent of taking your laptop for a weekend camping trip or a long sales meeting.

It makes more sense to commission a small task to create a working environment. The UL Procyon analysis imitates working on a laptop for several hours in a row, running from office application to office application and performing a "task" in one of them.

In fact, it turned out like this. Recall that in the actual study Meteor Lake, Lunar Lake and Ryzen AI were run in "Balanced" mode, and the Snapdragon X-elite remained in low power "recommended" mode. As said, to your taste... But can't we get at least 10 hours of computing power from all three competitors? This is a rudimentary fantasy.

Intel Lunar Lake: 17 hours 7 minutes.

Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite: 16 hours 20 minutes.

AMD Ryzen AI 300: 10 hours 42 minutes
Intel Meteor Lake: 10 hours 35 minutes.
Old chip bots probably remember Limeta, a laptop microprocessor manufacturing startup that had the ability to translate a personal set of manuals from x86 like ARM. The legacy of Limeta is not so much in what it accomplished, but in fact, it forced Intel to settle: to finally lapse into the laptop bazaar and create a competitive microprocessor for them in the first years of the new century. Now it's happened again. Intel's first Core Ultra, Meteor Lake, separated performance for a long-lasting battery life.
So is the Snapdragon Killer Lunar Lake on the table? Absolutely not. Speaking of performance, we can admit with complete confidence that Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite is still the most productive microprocessor. AMD's Ryzen chips win in productivity in many tasks, but this time they suffer in battery life.

Conclusion: Which laptop chip is better?

But in a way, this is meaningless. As ASUS' test laptop shows, add a few useless batteries and Qualcomm's advantage "goes away." But in various scenarios, except gaming, Snapdragon is simply better. Problems with comparability associated with the ARM manual and the impressive set of 3D arrows, they distinguish the Core Ultra Series 2 great advantage. All applications run on Intel and AMD cars, but on a laptop with Snapdragon, they have every chance to run with difficulty, but Qualcomm managed to force almost all the most famous applications to work on the arm.

The result is Intel Lunar Lake at its best for all tasks that depend on the CPU. When GPU or NPU comes to business, it will be higher. The same goes for autonomous work, where it competes perfectly with Snapdragon. (At some point, people will no longer care about autonomous work time. Does long-term battery life mean a stronger laptop?)

For several years now, it has been easy to choose the "best" chip for your laptop. Now the question is, which one is basically better for you. And there is no perfect answer: with Arrow Lake on the back burner, Intel has the opportunity to have another productive microprocessor up its sleeve. For Intel, it's a simple offer: Lunar Lake is a reliable bet, and Snapdragon has no compatibility issues.

Elim Rim - Journalist, creative writer

Last modified 01.03.2025

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