Intel's Core Ultra 200V for notebooks with long battery life

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Since the middle of the year, there have been a number of notebooks with particularly long battery life, namely those with Qualcomm's newcomer processor Snapdragon X. As a unique selling point of these notebooks, which bear the marketing label Copilot+, Microsoft is once again emphasizing innovative AI functions that run on integrated, powerful AI accelerators (Neural Processing Units, NPUs). AMD has already taken on the Snapdragon competitor with Ryzen AI 300 (Strix Point), now Intel is following suit with Core Ultra 200V (Lunar Lake).

The first notebook equipped with it in the c't lab is the ZenBook S 14 (UX5406) from Asus. The test device uses the Core Ultra 7 258V, which has 32 GB of RAM. Yes, it comes with it: With Lunar Lake, the LPDDR5X chips are an indispensable part of the CPU carrier, which is one of many tricks to reduce energy consumption and enable particularly long battery runtimes. Apple has been using the same design since the M1, while AMD and Qualcomm solder the memory chips separately onto the motherboard. Incidentally, the design doubles the number of model variants at Intel: A CPU with identical specifications except for 16 GB of RAM does not have the same designation, but is called Core Ultra 7 256V.

Intel designed Lunar Lake specifically for thin and light notebooks that remain quiet even under computing load. But while the design was originally intended as an out-of-series special, Intel's entire mobile future now rests on it: it is the only design in the Intel portfolio with an NPU powerful enough to meet Microsoft's requirements for Copilot+ and the new AI functions of Windows 11. When Microsoft communicated this requirement to its closest partners last year, Intel massively accelerated development. According to the original schedule, Lunar Lake would probably not have been ready until the end of 2025 instead of being available in notebooks now.

TDP performance and first benchmarks

The shift in the balance of power in the notebook market means that notebook manufacturers can now use Lunar Lake CPUs with higher thermal design power (TDP): Up to 37 watts are permitted, which requires complex cooling systems or makes their indispensable fans audible – nothing for slim notebooks that use purely passive cooling like the MacBook Air. At the lower end of the TDP range is 8 watts, but we have not yet seen any systems where the chip is operated at such low speeds.

Asus operates the Core Ultra 7 258V in the ZenBook S 14 in factory settings (Windows: Balanced, MyAsus: Standard mode) with a moderate 17 watts (peaks up to 22 watts), which corresponds to the nominal TDP and can still be reconciled with the original concept of the chip. However, this specification also inevitably brings to light the problem: Intel originally opted for a combination of only four efficiency cores and four performance cores; the latter also have to make do without Hyper-Threading. Something like this cannot be changed at a later date –, especially not when a chip design has to be completed even faster, as is the case here.

In concrete figures: The Core Ultra 7 258V only manages just under 500 points in the multithreading test of the Cinebench 2024 render benchmark. Although this is suitable for everyday use, it is less than what the predecessor Core Ultra 7 155H (Meteor Lake), which is only nine months old, achieved (over 570 points in the ZenBook sister model UX3405). Meteor Lake can nominally burn 28 watts and also has more cores, namely up to six P-cores (including hyperthreading), up to eight E-cores plus two low-power E-cores. Even the most modern production process – Lunar Lake uses TSMC's 3-nanometer process N3B – for the CPU and new core architectures for P and E cores cannot make up for this. By the way, Apple's M3, which is also manufactured in N3B, achieves a good 600 points.

You can coax more performance out of the ZenBook in higher energy profiles, but then it gets loud. Although its fan is not inaudible in factory settings, it is so inconspicuous that you never feel disturbed.

Lunar Lake doesn't come close to the competition from AMD and Qualcomm in terms of CPU performance: both the Ryzen AI 300 and Snapdragon X Elite are twelve-cores, and that's without the heavily trimmed E-cores. The fact that some are slightly modified implementations that make do with fewer transistors at the expense of the peak clock rate is irrelevant for maximum performance in TDP-limited notebooks. Depending on the TDP selected, these also pull away with 700 to 900 points. And HX processors from AMD and Intel, which are allowed to burn much more energy in expansive gaming notebooks, deliver four-digit results up to over 1300 points.

Under load on just one computing core, all CPUs for Windows notebooks are roughly at the same level around 120 Cinebench points, with only Qualcomm's Snapdragon variants without Turbo landing below 110 points. No one can compete with Apple in this discipline, as the M3 achieves 140 points.

Windows patches

Note: In the middle of the ongoing tests, Intel announced shortly before the editorial deadline that the Windows 11 update KB5043080 from the September patch day was slowing down notebooks with Core Ultra 200V; single-threaded tests were particularly affected. We did not comply with the request to uninstall the update for the tests: It seems questionable to uninstall an officially released update just to prettify benchmark results. Finally, the update will continue to be distributed to all systems with Windows 11 24H2 and thus also to all first-time buyers of Lunar Lake notebooks in order to close known and already exploited security vulnerabilities.

According to Intel, Microsoft is working on a fix, but has not given a release schedule. We will be happy to check as soon as the bug has been fixed and any major delays become apparent. As things stand today, this is not to be expected: Our qualitative assessments of performance above also match benchmark results without KB5043080, which Intel has provided as reference values for comparison.