Intel has detailed the full lineup of its Lunar Lake notebook CPUs which are expected to roll out later this month. The company has officially named the hardware the Intel Core Ultra 200V series. Intel says that starting on 24 September, laptops will ship with what it calls “the fastest CPU core”, the “world’s best built-in GPU” and “the best AI performance”.
Up to now, we have debated who would bring the so-called “best” to the market. Qualcomm and AMD have been fighting over battery life stats and who can generate the best images at the fastest rate. However, Intel claims the Core Ultra 200V does it all.
Dell is set to launch a revised XPS 13 notebook with the Intel Core Ultra 200V. The company says this notebook now gets up to 26 hours of 1080p Netflix streaming at 150 nits of brightness. This has increased over the 18 hours previously.
ASUS on the other hand, says the Zenbook S14 can last multiple hours longer than the Zenbook S16 with the AMD Ryzen AI chip. Keep in mind that the Zenbook S16 packs a 78Wh battery which is a larger cell than the S14.
When it comes to gaming, Intel says the Core Ultra 200V series (the V288 chip specifically) boasts 68% better frame rates on average than the top-shelf Qualcomm X1E-100. It also says the chip can deliver 16% better performance over the AMD HX 370 found in the ASUS Zenbook S16. This is raw performance and does not take into account any XeSS upscaling.
On paper with XeSS enabled, Intel says the Core Ultra V288 can run Cyberpunk 2077 at 45FPS, Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered at 57FPS and Shadow of the Tomb Raider at 66FPS. However, the company didn’t say what settings and resolutions these games were running on.
Intel also promises 58% faster AI performance over the Ultra 7. This is expected given the increased NPU cores on this chip.
The Lunar Lake tech, now known as Intel Ultra 200V Series also comes with the most modern tech baked-in. Notebooks with these chips will have Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4 and 2 Thunderbolt 4 ports guaranteed. Keep in mind that these chips are also exclusively designed for thin and light notebooks. So you won’t find an Intel Core Ultra 200V CPU in beefier notebooks.
Intel has built these chips to utilize 32GB of baked-on RAM. The chip includes only eight CPU cores, eight CPU threads and a max of eight GPU cores. The tech doesn’t allow for any increase anywhere across these specs. The big sell for Lunar Lake is its baked RAM sticks which are built-in to the CPU.
The variation of CPUs coming out in the Core Ultra 200V lineup tweak the frequency of the cores, increases the LLC Cache, NPU TOPS and GPU frequency. For example, the base Core Ultra 5 226V runs at 3.5GHz on the CPU and 1.85GHz on the GPU with 40 AI TOPS. The top Core Ultra 9 288V runs at 3.7GHz on the CPU and 20.5GHz on the GPU with 48 AI TOPS.
Here’s a breakdown of all the models below:
It will be interesting to see how these chips stack up against the now-released AMD Ryzen AI and Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite. This is Intel’s moment to shine in the notebook scene so we hope these chips deliver.
