IFA 2024 | Core Ultra Series 2: In Lunar Lake, Intel introduces its most efficient x86 CPU yet

Roughly one year after announcing the Core Ultra Series 1, also known as Meteor Lake, Intel follows up with the second generation. Core Ultra Series 2 aka Lunar Lake was already introduced at June's Computex. At IFA, the final launch of the Core Ultra 200V series comes, for which Intel had one focus: Making x86 CPUs as efficient as possible.

Efficiency: Up to 50 percent lower power consumption than Meteor Lake

Of course, Intel had the same goal with Meteor Lake, the first architecture where Intel put Low Power E cores into the SoC tile. This was supposed to take off some load from the Compute tile and thus lower the power consumption. By now, it has become clear that this did not work out as planned. The Meteor Lake LP E cores were simply not fast enough, which meant that the Compute tile had to jump into action too often.

Lunar Lake is supposed to change this. There are no more E cores in the CPU tile here. Instead, Intel doubles the amount of E cores in the SoC tile to four. The new Skymont cores have much higher clock rates than the Crestmont cores of the predecessor, allowing Intel to keep the P cores in the Compute tile disabled for much longer. Alongside with other changes to the CPU design that are meant to save energy, Lunar Lake is much more efficient than before. Compared with Meteor Lake H, the power consumption is up to 50 percent lower, depending on the app.

The development of Intel's CPUs only knew a single direction for years: More performance, higher power consumption. With Meteor Lake, Intel tried to break with this trend first, but the real breakthrough seems to be Lunar Lake - if the platform delivers as Intel promises.

The new CPU and GPU architecture, combined with TSMC's N3 process node, seems to give Intel the performance boost it sorely needed. Especially, the U CPUs have not been competitive for a long time, as Intel CPUs pretty much had to consume 30 W or more to be competitive. For the Core Ultra 200V, things are different, as the new chips have their strengths between 10 and 20 W. This will likely help Intel especially with thin and light laptops and may even enable fanless designs with x86 CPUs. Gaming handhelds could also profit from the better efficiency and better performance of the Lunar Lake iGPU.

Certainly, those are not all parts of the PC market. It remains to be seen how and when Intel will bring the advantages of the Lunar Lake platform to bigger laptops and desktops. This leads us over to Arrow Lake, the new mainstream CPU platform from Intel. With the economic problems that Intel has at the moment, Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake may be a make-or-break moment for the company.

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