Intel Launches Lunar Lake: Claims Arm-Beating Battery Life, World's Fastest Mobile CPU Cores (tomshardware.com) 56
Intel launched its new Core Ultra 200V-series processors on Tuesday, promising significant improvements in power efficiency, performance, and battery life over competitors and previous generations. The company claims the chips offer "historic x86 power efficiency" and the "world's fastest mobile CPU cores." The processors, available for pre-order in OEM systems and shipping September 24, feature four Lion Cove P-cores and four Skymont E-cores with boost speeds up to 5.1 GHz.
Intel says the chips deliver up to 20.1 hours of battery life, Tom's Hardware reports, outperforming Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite by nearly two hours and AMD's chips by almost four hours. Intel asserts a 30% faster gaming performance than competing processors and highlighted compatibility issues with Qualcomm's chips, noting that nearly two dozen games used for benchmarking failed to run on X Elite chips. The company claims up to 64% advantage in single-threaded performance over Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite and up to 33% over AMD Strix Point HX370.
Intel says the chips deliver up to 20.1 hours of battery life, Tom's Hardware reports, outperforming Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite by nearly two hours and AMD's chips by almost four hours. Intel asserts a 30% faster gaming performance than competing processors and highlighted compatibility issues with Qualcomm's chips, noting that nearly two dozen games used for benchmarking failed to run on X Elite chips. The company claims up to 64% advantage in single-threaded performance over Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite and up to 33% over AMD Strix Point HX370.
I'm interested but (Score:2, Interesting)
It's hard to trust a company when they're talking about cutting that much that fast.
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Linus tech tips has a good video on it (Score:2)
I'm not a big fan of LTT, but it was a good vid.
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The impression I got is that if you don't game and don't do heavy CAD stuff then they are fine, and ideal if you want good battery life. Basically if you aren't looking for a gaming laptop or a workstation laptop, Windows on ARM is already a great option.
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The same exact thing could be said about running Linux. And based on the number of people still running Windows, there are a LOT of people who either need or are more comfortable with Wintel.
Re:I'm interested but (Score:5, Informative)
How small do you think Intel is? Chipzilla is huge - that mass layoff was 15% of their workforce. By raw people, those 15,000 people laid off would represent nearly HALF of AMD's workforce. So even post layoff, Intel's headcount is still nearly 3 times that of AMD.
That would be like Microsoft laying off people - there's just so many to begin with that even big numbers are relatively small for the company.
Though, by absolute numbers, it makes Apple's look really small by comparison (100-ish people).
It seems like it's all doom and gloom at Intel, but remember only a few years ago it was all doom and gloom at AMD - and with AMD, it was far more serious. Intel still has plenty of money and resources.
Processors (Score:2)
Were the layoffs in the processor department? Because Intel has a *lot* of departments. They still make FPGA cards, webcams, and SSDs, none of which make any money from what I've heard.
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They're looking to sell off Altera.
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I'm not sure you're Intel's "customer"....
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Considering how badly Intel treated their Raptor Lake buyers, nobody should be looking at their products anyway.
Re: I'm interested but (Score:2)
I stopped buying from them a long time ago.
All their illegal actions against AMD made me feel dirty in giving them money.
But here we are, people keep giving them the benefit of the doubt, yet constantly trash everything that AMD says or do.
Let me know when I can use it without a fan. (Score:2, Informative)
Re: Let me know when I can use it without a fan. (Score:4, Informative)
There are lots of intel chips approved for industrial use with a passive heatsink. Generally they are underclocked versions of a family. The compromise is a large mass heatsink adds cost and underclocking impacts performance.
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What is consumerised?
I've got a 14 year old Intel laptop that I use daily. It has a fan, it's five.
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The DT360 was consumerized, almost. Not quite reliable enough, alas. I wonder if that was AMD's fault, or DT? I found my DT166 to be pretty good. I wonder if I still have that, it would be a cool retro gaming rig now. I know I got rid of the 360.
But snark and irrelevance aside, I wanted to say that out of all the years I've had laptops (most of them, and usually multiples) the only one on which I've had to replace the fan was a Fujitsu Lifebook T901 convertible. I've done it twice now. The machine has been
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Fans and other moving parts are a no-no
Better throw out your air conditioner, refrigerator, car, air fryer, hair dryer and all the other things that require fans, then.
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Aside from the fact you can run literally any Intel mobile CPU without a fan (the person integrating the chip decides on the thermal envelope), and aside from the fact that Intel has a history of producing chips which are fanless (I actually have an Intel Avoton C2750 in my server which is fanless) there's nothing bad about fans. As a moving part they last for absolute ages (they aren't a sensitive part prone to failure like a HDD that gets moved) and if they do fail they are trivially replaced off the shel
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>> there's no reason at all to not want a fan.
There is a reason.
Noise for example. When you work in a quiet environment, a fan is just a pain in the ears.
Power efficiency, performance, battery life (Score:1)
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-not even sorry
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Make compromises.
How long will the chips survive (Score:2, Informative)
That's probably fixed (Score:2)
But yeah, Intel has the same problem as Boeing. MBAs running (read:gutting) the company instead of engineers.
Re:That's probably fixed (Score:4, Interesting)
since it's newer silicone. the 14th gen CPUs don't have the burn out issue. But yeah, Intel has the same problem as Boeing. MBAs running (read:gutting) the company instead of engineers.
I think our current environment breeds this issue. If a company stumbles slightly, they start looking at MBAs to fix it. While MBAs can give decent financial advice, they aren't the magic pill some in the business world seems to believe they are. They'll help you find profits for the short-term. They are *NOT* great a long-term, nor are they any good at all when it comes to technical expertise for any given field, which is required for engineering in both aircraft and chip design, engineering that's EXTREMELY important to the long-term that the MBAs will insist simply doesn't exist.
And once the MBAs get decision making power, the company is in the death spiral. While it can be pulled out of, it requires somebody in the firm to be strong enough to step up and tell the MBA Wise Men to shove it, right at the point where nearly universally everyone would be seeking the MBA Wise Men to help guide them back to profit NOAW! not later, nor long-term.
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14th gen Raptor Lake absolutely has the "burnout" issue. And Intel has offered nothing but a bandaid fix that may extend the life of the 14900k etc. by a few months.
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Had the same problem; Pat Gelsinger is absolutely an engineer (and a good one by all accounts). You're right though in that Intel had years of being run by "career CEO's" rather than technology people.
What's your favourite Intel lie? (Score:5, Interesting)
Intel's claims haven't been worth the toilet paper they were written on for about 5 years now. Their marketing department went so far off the deep end, they even stopped creating heavily biased benchmarks to try and prove their point* and just went straight out mistruths comparing processor made in different years and with different price points to show they are "better".
So let's play a game, what's your favourite Intel lie?
Here's two of mine: ... while using a different and better GPU.
Anti-normal-consumer: Claimed their 10th Gen Laptop CPUs were 20% better than AMDs for gaming
Anti-tech-consumer: Throwing TDP out the window because their CPUs were power hungry garbage meaning that people could not longer use the figure to buy a CPU cooler. - AMD did eventually follow suit - but I blame Intel for shitting this bed first.
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Yeah, I have to wonder at what resolution is that Strix Point comparison.
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Add in the abusive behavior related to Raptor Lake. There are still people waiting for RMAs on their flawed CPUs that crash running UE5 and other stuff. Why would anyone buy Intel now?
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The problem is x86 - the whole front end processor - the translator that takes an x86 instruction and turns it into whatever RISC core Intel is implemented - is huge. It takes more area than the actual core processor, and more power because it has to decode instructions and break them up into micro-ops (the RISC instructions) to issue them. And that's expensive.
The Pentium was the last processor to run x86 code directly - the Pentium Pro and onwards went RISC with a front end emulator. And despite the speed
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the translator that takes an x86 instruction and turns it into whatever RISC core Intel is implemented - is huge. It takes more area than the actual core processor, and more power because it has to decode instructions and break them up into micro-ops
That is just not true in the slightest. The entire front end including translator, scheduler, branch predictor, FPU, etc takes up less than 20% of the entire die. It's true that CPU cores only take up about 1/3rd of the die, but that's because the largest part of it is cache.
The translator isn't power hungry either. It's true that Intel will struggle to really get ARM efficiency but that's largely due to their architecture Intel's RISC is not the same as AMD's RISC is not the same as ARM's RISC - it's a gen
How about Linux? (Score:2)
Linux at the moment can't disable the P cores in Meteor Lake because Linux can't swap away from the boot core? Will Lunar lake boot from an E core or is Intel going to contribute code to allow Linux to swap out the boot core?
With self-destruct? (Score:2)
Or with easy to exploit vulnerabilities? Well, maybe both.
Yeah, but how many security flaws? (Score:1)
This is cool, but I want to know how many security flaws it has and how many we'll find out about after there are already a billion devices out there that can't be fixed.
Attention Span Cancer (Score:3)
The Battle is Already Over (Score:2)
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Err, no wait, I'll use my ARM Steam Deck...
Coming from someone who runs Linux on the desktop and really, really wants RISK V to happen, x86_64 is the norm outside of phones and new macbooks. Otherwise it's a software support nightmare and chromebooks in the trash.
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Arguably, Nintendo's wildly successful Switch is an ARM Steam Deck, and that CPU/GPU combo was obsolete when the Switch was released. Works great for the purpose it was designed for.
Sure you can't run general desktop programs or Windows games from 1995 on it, but that's not the point of the device.
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ARM won the laptop cpu architecture war. Somebody please let Intel know.
RISC-V says, "hold my beer".
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A real consumer RISC-V laptop is still many years away.
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Apple won the buy the top TSMC node battle for a while, Intel decided to play.
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ARM won the laptop cpu architecture war.
Only for low-end laptops. For higher-end laptops, not even close. There is no ARM laptop which does what the high-end PC laptops do. They are pretty close in the middle of the range, but why would you dick with ARM when support will be inferior if it's not providing an actual advantage?
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Yeah, maybe, for those who only use basic software
There is a LOT of specialized software that only runs on x86 and will never be ported
Some of it is REALLY expensive. Some is made by long dead companies
Saying that ARM can replace all desktop computing is silly
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Yeah, maybe, for those who only use basic software There is a LOT of specialized software that only runs on x86 and will never be ported Some of it is REALLY expensive. Some is made by long dead companies Saying that ARM can replace all desktop computing is silly
So....you're saying Intel's survival in this space depends not on technical superiority, but instead depends on ensuring there is a large pool of legacy apps out there that will never get ported? In that case, why even bother with coming out with new CPU's?
Who cares? (Score:3)
competition is good (Score:3)
Intel extends finger to Arm.
Tom's Was It - But Now Seems Pro-Intel (Score:2)
Re: Tom's Was It - But Now Seems Pro-Intel (Score:2)
I stopped a long time ago.
The bias there is so sick that their âoewritersâ can spew out whole articles about CPUâ(TM)s and GPUâ(TM)s without mentioning AMD not even once.
But they will make sure to mention intel and Ngreedia.
SMB servers (Score:2)
I'm tending to some cheap n100 boxes where energy consumption is key (solar computing).
Throw in a 32GB dimm and turn on VT-d in the BIOS and Xen boots just fine and most apps hum right along for a small office.
It sounds like these would be even more efficient.
I'm not saying imagine a Beowulf Cluster of these, but a half dozen on a rack shelf would be nice for a redundant cluster where massive processing power is needed.
Even Ceph can run on small nvme these days.
Going to ARM on existing phone hardware was ju
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> is needed.
(scratch that - reverse it)