Powering the Lunar Lake Laptops: More Hours for Intel than the ZenBook S 14 and the XeSS Upscaling
Intel says it can beat a 14-thread or 22-thread chip at lower power, but last-gen chips from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices can actually pull ahead with more power. Here’s the slide that shows that:
The laptop with the larger 78Wh battery pack is the one that Intel says can last multiple hours longer than the Zenbook S 14 with Intel.
If it is true, that is a 44 percent improvement for Intel. (Never mind that the Qualcomm version of the XPS 13 quotes a slightly longer life of up to 27 hours.)
And that’s without using Intel’s XeSS upscaling. In Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Spider-Man Remastered, the company says they are within reach of the integrated GPUs. (Intel didn’t provide resolution and graphical settings for the ray-traced claims, though.)
There should be excellent baked in connectivity for the Lunar Lake laptops, including multiple 4K monitors and at least two of the Thunderbolt 4 ports.
The price of an 8-core processor for a new CPU: Why the price of 10 Cores is cheaper than $20200$ for an entry-level laptop
Every one of Intel’s nine Core Ultra 200V chips has just eight CPU cores, eight CPU threads, a maximum of eight GPU cores, and up to 32GB of RAM, with no way to add more in the future. One of Intel’s key efficiency improvements was getting rid of separate memory sticks or chips, baking it into the CPU package instead. Intel also did away with hyperthreading, the technique that let CPU cores run more than one thread.
Remember when Core i3, Core i5, and Core i7 meant different numbers of CPU cores and threads? Lunar Lake throws that out the window; it’s got fewer dividing lines than ever.
As you can see, only 300MHz of turbo clock and 100MHz of GPU max frequency separate Intel’s flagship Ultra 9 288V from its lesser Ultra 7 258V — but the wattage boost might matter a lot more than MHz for performance. Can not say at the moment.
But you don’t need to jump, and they may get better while you wait. According to Intel, Microsoft will be releasing a free update to their Copilot Plus features in November, but they won’t ship with them.
According to Qualcomm’s own internal benchmarks for the new 8-core chips (take with grain of salt), all that means they’re roughly 80 percent as capable as the company’s 12-core chips in the CPU realm, and on-par with the 10-core chips for productivity. But with the 8-core, those graphics scores are predictably cut in half.
Would you like to save your money this way? I could definitely see it for entry-level laptop buyers — particularly if you’re actually saving $400, as the case might be for the Asus Vivobook S 15. The laptop has the same 70 watt-hour battery and 3K 120Hz display as the previous one, but it is only $900 if you use the 8-core chip. Half of the storage is being sacrificed, as you will get 512 Gigabyte instead of 1 Terabyte.
The $1,099 ProArt PZ13 has the same 3K screen, and 70 watt hour battery, but with a separate keyboard and stylus support, and should be available today. The Latitude 5455 is very similar to the Inspiron and has no pricing, but it does have a new chip.
