Intel's Lunar Lake CPU has been tested by Geekerwan, revealing superb 15W gaming performance against current-gen handhelds.
Intel Lunar Lake Could End Up Being A Surprise Hit In The Handheld Gaming Segment, Great Performance at Low Power & Strong CPU IPC Gains
Last month, Intel launched its Lunar Lake "Core Ultra 200V" CPUs which are aimed at thin & light platforms. Instantly, the CPU became a hit with many testers praising its GPU performance & battery timings. The CPU also saw a major gain in performance despite featuring just 8 cores and 8 threads. Now, hardware veteran Geekerwan has posted his numbers showcasing how the chip performs in different scenarios.
Starting first with the 15W tests, the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V was tested against the Steam Deck and ASUS ROG Ally (Z1 Extreme) in a 15W constrained TDP mode at 720P to showcase what gamers can expect from Lunar Lake in a handheld design. The Lunar Lake chip has 12W power due to its SoC and DRAM being on the same package while the competition is around 9W with the motherboard sipping the extra power but confined to the same 15W limit.
In terms of performance, the Intel Lunar Lake CPU provides great performance at low power, which is up to 67% faster than the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 at the same 15W limit. The 1% Low FPS is higher than the average frame rate of the RDNA 3.5 and Alchemist Xe-LPG iGPUs and far exceeds the current handhelds in Black Myth Wukong.
In Cyberpunk 2077, the Lunar Lake SOC delivers over 2x the GPU performance versus the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 and almost 3x versus the Z1 Extreme featured on the ROG Ally with FSR enabled. This is truly a groundbreaking performance that should make Lunar Lake-powered handhelds an awesome platform for gamers who were kind of disappointed with the Meteor Lake designs.
Geekerwan also tested each chip at an unconstrained full power mode. The Lunar Lake CPUs can only peak out up to 30W while the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 peaks out at 80W and the Core Ultra 9 185H peaks out at 90W.
In gaming performance, the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 was only marginally ahead of the Lunar Lake "Xe2" iGPU while sipping in almost 2.5-3.0x more power. The Lunar Lake chip also matched or exceeded the Meteor Lake CPU which shows just how efficient Xe2 is.
At a 30W TDP limit, the Intel Lunar Lake SoC stomped the AMD Strix Point and Intel Meteor Lake CPUs with much better gaming performance.
Moving over to battery performance, the Intel Lunar Lake "Core Ultra 7 258V" CPU featured on the Yoga Air 15 laptop offered a battery life of up to 11 hours and 14 minutes which almost matches the MacBook Air 2023 with M3 SoC. The ASUS ZenBook S16 with a bigger 78Wh battery (vs 70Wh) & the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 only managed 8 hours and 40 minutes of screen time while the Core Ultra 9 185H was the worst performer with 6 hours and 34 minutes of screen time.
Other interesting figures are the idle (screen off) power which was the lowest among all SoCs for Lunar Lake, with a power draw of just 0.62W versus Apple's M3 at 0.70W while the Meteor Lake CPU sipped 2.32W and AMD Strix sipped 3.28W. Even with video playback, the Lunar Lake SoC fared better than the rest of the x86 options and even Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite with just 5.69W of power input compared to 7.27W (Snapdragon X), 12.09W (Meteor Lake) and 19.08W (Strix Point).
Lastly, we have some more details on the IPC performance of Lunar Lake and its two primary CPU cores, the Lion Cove P-Core and the Skymont LP-E core.
The performance for each core was tested within SPEC 2017 using a fixed clock of 4.0 GHz and it looks like the Lion Cove P-Core ends up the fastest in the x86 segment in terms of integer performance while lacking behind a bit in floating point. The Lion Cove P-Core also manages to close in on the Oryon CPU core for Snapdragon SoCs in INT while Apple's M3 just sit on a whole different level.
The Skymont LP-E core was also compared to the Crestmont LP-E core featured on Meteor Lake and is a major uplift at a fixed clock of 3 GHz. It scored a 10% lead in Integer performance & a 9% lead in Floating Point performance. The Skymont LP-E core is slightly slower than the Zen 4 cores but we can expect the standard non-LP variant of Skymont to deliver similar performance.
Intel Lunar Lake
Dieshot LayoutThanks GeenWens Give Chip
Thanks 万扯淡 Decap
Layout By KurnalPhoto1 Lunar Lake SOC Dieshot（Diesize 8.58x16.27）
Photo2 Lunar Lake Refactor（Diesize 13.10x16.77） pic.twitter.com/shPwXrUlzL— Kurnal (@Kurnalsalts) October 2, 2024
Overall, Intel's Lunar Lake CPUs do feel like a phenomenal chip for their intended markets and we can't wait to see their applications in compact solutions such as Mini PCs and gaming handhelds where they are going to shine. We can also expect a range of CPU, graphics, and memory side optimizations for the platform in the coming months which would further enhance the performance capabilities of these SoCs.
News Source: Geekerwan
About the author: A Software Engineer by training and a PC enthusiast by passion, Hassan Mujtaba serves as Wccftech's Senior Editor for hardware section. With years of experience in the industry, he specializes in deep-dive technical analysis of next-generation CPU and GPU architectures, motherboards, and cooling solutions. His work involves not only breaking news on upcoming technologies but also extensive hands-on reviews and benchmarking.
Follow Wccftech on Google to get more of our news coverage in your feeds.
