Intel's Core Ultra 200V for notebooks with long battery life
Page 2: Battery life at ARM level
Less is more when it comes to long battery runtimes: as many cores as possible should sleep when the system load is low and the remaining ones should then consume as little energy as possible – together with the rest of the core system, where only as few functional units as possible are active.
Qualcomm in particular has shown the way in this respect: The highlight of notebooks with Snapdragon X and Copilot+ is not the prospect of new AI functions, but their already usable, incredibly long battery runtimes. Even if computing power is required in the meantime, you can easily get through an entire working day without a power supply. While AMD's powerful Strix Point couldn't keep up in this respect, Lunar Lake makes up for it: with a good 24 hours at best, the ZenBook S 14 plays in the very top league, which devices with Snapdragon X only recently opened up.
On the plus side, Intel's newcomer also boasts a significantly improved graphics unit called Arc 140V. Based on its specifications and initial benchmark results, it is poised to become the fastest integrated GPU. It achieves over 15,000 points in 3DMark Solar Bay, while the competition ranks at 12,000 (AMD Radeon 880M) or around 10,000 points (Qualcom Adreno X1-85).
That's nice if you want to play some games on your work device in your hotel room in the evening, but it doesn't make gaming notebooks obsolete. The Arc 140V is powerless against the 3D graphics that Nvidia's RTX 40 GPUs conjure up on notebook screens: the mobile GeForce RTX 4070, for example, achieves 50,000 to 60,000 points in the Solar Bay, depending on the notebook. On devices with an integrated graphics unit, you often have to turn down the resolution and set the detail controls to the minimum to achieve smooth refresh rates. And because the CPU performance tends to be weaker with Lunar Lake, there is a higher risk that it will be the bottleneck and the GPU will not be able to deliver its theoretical raw performance to the screen.
The tricky thing is that gaming notebooks are at the opposite end of the spectrum to Lunar Lake notebooks in terms of performance, battery life and weight. They are only slightly different in terms of price: For the 1700 euros that the ZenBook S 14 tested here costs, you can also get much more powerful 16-inch laptops with a fast GeForce RTX 4070. Price comparisons currently list a single Lunar Lake notebook below 1400 euros (ab 1199 €).
(Image: c't)
Price structure
This means that the combination of long battery life, future-proof NPU and, unlike Qualcomm, unlimited x86 backward compatibility despite comparatively weak CPU performance offered by Lunar Lake comes at a high price. Because Lunar Lake requires fresh notebooks due to its special design with integrated RAM, which in turn is expensive to develop, little will change in the medium term.
Lunar Lake shares this high-priced fate with AMD's Ryzen AI 300: notebooks equipped with it start in a similar price range, and better equipped notebooks from AMD and Intel are within reach of the €2000 mark. So anyone who already identified the high starting prices from 1200 euros as a knock-out criterion for the Snapdragon X debut will find even less in the x86 world.
In the ARM world, on the other hand, prices are already crumbling: the Snapdragon X Plus with eight cores and a slimmed-down GPU, which was launched at IFA , is available in notebooks from just under 900 euros. The trend is downwards, as some models with an elite twelve-core are now available for as little as 1000 euros. If you make sure that all your apps already run under Windows on ARM, you can get incredibly long battery life and a powerful NPU for much less money if you choose Qualcomm instead of AMD or Intel.
This won't change any time soon, as AMD, Intel and notebook manufacturers still like to sell older models with outdated CPU vintages such as the 12th Core i generation for less than 1000 euros. Their runtimes are significantly shorter and there is no NPU at all. This is only available in the Ryzen 7040/8040 and Core Ultra 100. However, these are still part of the first generation of AI accelerators, which are not sufficient for Microsoft's Copilot+ requirements – and are therefore likely to be ignored by other software manufacturers before they have even seriously considered them.
Even Microsoft is still waiting: the full functionality of Copilot+ will not be delivered for AMD Ryzen AI 300 and Intel Core Ultra 200V until November via a Windows update. So anyone who buys one of these now will still have to wait for functions such as Cocreator and translated live subtitles, which Snapdragon X laptops have been offering since the middle of the year.
A detailed review of the Asus ZenBook S 14 (UX5406) with all benchmarks and impressions of the device will follow at a later date.
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