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Since the middle of the year, there have been a number of notebooks with particularly long lifespans, namely those running Qualcomm’s new entry-level processors with Snapdragon accelerators (neural processing units, NPUs). AMD has already countered Snapdragon with the Ryzen AI 300 (Strix Point), now Intel is following suit with the Core Ultra 200V (Lunar Lake).
The first notebook equipped with it in the c’t laboratory is Asus’s ZenBook S 14 (UX5406). The test sample uses the Core Ultra 7 258V, coupled with 32 GB of RAM. Yes, he brings it with him: In Lunar Lake, LPDDR5X chips are an essential part of the CPU carrier, one of several tricks to reduce energy consumption and enable particularly long battery life. Apple has been using the same design since the M1, while AMD and Qualcomm solder the memory chips separately to the motherboard. Incidentally, the design doubles the number of model variants at Intel: a CPU with identical specifications except for 16 GB of RAM does not have the same name, but is called the Core Ultra 7 256V.
Intel designed Lunar Lake specifically for thin and light notebooks that stay cool even under computing loads. But while the design was originally intended to be an out-of-the-box oddity, Intel’s entire mobile future now depends on it: it’s the only design in the Intel portfolio with an NPU powerful enough to meet Microsoft’s requirements for Copilot+ and the new AI functions of Windows 11. When Microsoft announced this requirement to its closest partners last year, Intel massively accelerated development. Instead of being available in notebooks now, according to the original schedule, Lunar Lake would have been available until possibly late 2025.
Intel’s Lunar Lake processor: consists of three chiplets (called tiles by Intel) and places two LPDDR5X components directly on the CPU carrier (also called a package).
(Image: c’t/mue)
TDP performance and first benchmarks
The changing balance of power in the notebook market means that notebook manufacturers can now run Lunar Lake CPUs with higher waste heat (thermal design power, TDP): up to 37 watts is allowed, which requires complex cooling systems or makes their required fans audible. – Not for thin notebooks that use completely passive cooling, like the MacBook Air. 8 watts is at the low end of the TDP range, but we haven’t seen any systems yet where the chip runs at such a low speed.
The Core Ultra 7 on the Asus ZenBook S 14 runs 258V at a moderate 17 watts (maximum up to 22 watts) in factory state (Windows: Balanced, MyAsus: Standard mode), which matches the nominal TDP and is still in line with the basic concept of the chip. However, this definition also essentially brings horseshoes to light: Intel originally decided on a combination of only four efficiency and four performance cores; the latter will also have to do without Hyper-Threading. Something that cannot be changed later – especially when such a chip design has to be accomplished even faster.
In concrete numbers: The Core Ultra 7 258V managed just under 500 points in the multithreading test of the Cinebench 2024 rendering benchmark. This is suitable for everyday use, but less than the nine-month-old predecessor, the Core Ultra 7 155H (Meteor Lake) (the ZenBook sister model UX3405 scores over 570 points). Meteor Lake can burn a nominal 28 watts and also has more cores, namely up to six P-cores (including hyperthreading), eight E-cores and two low-power E-cores. Even the most modern manufacturing process – Lunar Lake uses TSMC’s 3-nanometer N3B process for CPUs – and new core architectures for the P and E cores cannot compensate for such a thing. By the way, Apple’s M3, which is also manufactured in N3B, scores a good 600 points.
You can get more performance out of the ZenBook in the high power profile, but then it gets louder. In factory settings, its fan is not inaudible, but it is inconspicuous enough that you never feel disturbed.
Lunar Lake doesn’t come close to the competition from AMD and Qualcomm in terms of CPU performance: both the Ryzen AI 300 and Snapdragon X Elite are twelve-core, and without significantly reducing the E-cores. The fact that some are slightly modified implementations that use fewer transistors at the expense of peak clock speeds plays no role in maximum performance in TDP-limited notebooks. Depending on the chosen TDP, they achieve 700 to 900 points. And AMD and Intel’s HX processors, which can burn a lot of energy in detailed gaming notebooks, deliver four-digit results, up to over 1300 points.
When loaded on only one core, all CPUs for Windows notebooks are at the same level of about 120 Cinebench points; only Qualcomm’s Snapdragon variants fall below 110 points without Turbo. No one can beat Apple in this discipline, as the M3 maintains 140 points.
Windows Patch
Note: Amid ongoing tests, Intel announced shortly before the editorial deadline that Windows 11 update KB5043080 from the September patch day was slowing down notebooks with Core Ultra 200V; single-threaded tests are particularly affected. We did not comply with the request to uninstall the update for the tests: uninstalling an officially released update just to improve benchmark results seems suspicious. Updates to close known and already exploited security gaps will eventually continue to be distributed to all systems with Windows 11 24H2 and to all original buyers of Lunar Lake notebooks.
According to Intel, Microsoft is working on a solution, but does not give any release timetable. We will be happy to test again as soon as the error is fixed and the major changes become clear. To date, this cannot be assumed: Our qualitative assessment of performance mentioned above matches the benchmark results even without KB5043080, which Intel has provided as a reference value for comparison.
