Intel's Lunar Lake CPUs are shaping up to be quite a disruptive x86 platform for thin & light laptops with lots of battery time compared to Apple offerings.
Intel Lunar Lake x86 CPUs Trounce Apple's M3 & M2 Arm Chips In Laptop Showdown, Almost 24 Hours of Battery Life
Launched on the 3rd of September, the Intel Lunar Lake CPUs will be heading out to retail shelves in a few days and it looks like OEMs are teasing the impressive battery life of their designs. Lenovo is one such partner who has offered a teaser of its Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition design which features the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V CPU and compares it up against Apple's M2 and M3 laptops.
The testing methodology is quite simple, focusing on the Local Video Playback capabilities with 150 nits of brightness & looping a video sample which is based on the H.264 (1920x1080.24FPS) format. The Intel Lunar Lake CPUs on the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i are equipped with 32 GB of memory which has been featured on the same package as the main die itself and was running on Windows 11 OS with the 24H2 update. The company does state that the laptop is an engineering sample used for tests so final results may vary.
The competition includes the Apple MacBook offerings in M2 (8 GB) and M3 (24 GB) flavors. With the Intel Lunar Lake CPU, the Lenovo laptop managed to offer a battery life of up to 23 hours and 54 minutes while the Apple MacBook laptop with M3 chip came in second place with a battery life of 18 hours and 32 minutes while the M2 design came in last with a battery life of 18 hours and 19 minutes.
This marks a 30% improvement in battery times and almost 5.5 hours extra battery time with the Intel Lunar Lake CPUs. Having a day's worth of battery time does sound awesome but of course, the CPU needs to be evaluated in other workloads too to see if the battery results end up in the same ballpark or vary from workload to workload as more portions of the chip get users. Other benchmarks have also shown the Intel Lunar Lake platform to outpace the competition in terms of battery life with pre-production units but the lead isn't as significant as shown by Lenovo officially.
Dell is another OEM that has claimed up to 26 hours of battery time with its Intel Lunar Lake CPU-powered XPS 13 laptops which start at $1399 US.
One thing is for sure Lunar Lake seems to be the right chip for Intel to get back into the PC race. The company has struggled a lot and it's shown in its recent earnings but Lunar Lake might just be a ray of hope for the blue team who have also announced commitment towards stronger x86 products in the future. Expect Lunar Lake laptop reviews to land in the coming days as we head closer to the 24th September retail launch.
