Intel’s Robert Hallock Dishes On Core Ultra 200V Lunar Lake Vs Competition At IFA Berlin

intel hallock gaming

Today at the IFA Berlin tech trade show, HotHardware honcho Dave Altavilla caught up with Intel’s Robert Hallock to do a quick interview concerning the company’s new Core Ultra Series 2 mobile processors. This family currently comprises the Core Ultra 200V parts, code-named Lunar Lake, a set of extremely efficient mobile SoCs meant for both thin & light laptops as well as handheld gaming machines.

Hallock had some pretty sharp words for Intel’s competitors. Comparing Lunar Lake to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite, he says “they made a good chip, and we made a better one.” It doesn’t get much more point-blank than that. Intel seems intent on backing up that kind of bravado, though. Hallock says that the Lion Cove architecture used in Lunar Lake’s P-cores is the “fastest CPU core in the industry” boasting the highest 1T speeds in benchmarks. That’s particularly impressive given the relatively modest clock rates in Lunar Lake.
Despite the high performance, he notes that Lunar Lake offers around double the energy efficiency compared to Meteor Lake, particularly at lower TDP values. Overall package power is down by “around 50%”, and that apparently allows for up to 25 hours of battery life if you’re just binging Netflix. Compared against the Snapdragon X Elite, Hallock says that Lunar Lake is about 20% more efficient in office productivity, while it trades blows with Qualcomm’s part on battery life depending on workload.
intel core uiltra series 2 photo

One workload that we know is rather problematic on Snapdragon X Elite is gaming. Graphics performance on Lunar Lake is up by around 30%, and in combination with perfect compatibility across a 50-game test suite, it’s really stomping a mudhole in the Adreno part built into Qualcomm’s chip. But what about rival AMD? Hallock acknowledges that AMD has traditionally been very good at integrated graphics, but says that Lunar Lake’s Xe2 integrated GPU is some 16% faster versus the RDNA 3.5 graphics in AMD’s Ryzen AI 300 processors.

Of course, because it’s 2024, we have to talk about AI performance. Hallock notes that Lunar Lake sits just ahead of Qualcomm’s NPU in terms of performance at 48 TOPS, but his main argument in favor of Intel’s parts is that Intel supports almost any data type across the three AI processors on the Lunar Lake die: the NPU, 4+4 x86-64 CPU cores, and then the Xe2 GPU with XMX units, which is actually the fastest of the three. In comparison, both AMD and Qualcomm have much more limited format support for AI workloads.

There still aren’t that many consumer-facing AI workloads yet, though. Intel says that it still received many questions about what AI can do for its users. As an easy demo of Lunar Lake’s AI capabilities, Hallock shows off the AI Playground app that launched back in July. That’s a free download for anyone with an Intel GPU or Core Ultra CPU, including Meteor Lake and Lunar Lake processors. It allows users to work with large language models or generate images using free and open source diffusers.

Intel’s Core Ultra 200V CPUs are officially launched today, and pre-orders are open for laptops sporting the new chips. Those machines are expected to be shipping by the third week of this month. Hallock says that we’re likely to see Lunar Lake pop up in other places, too, though, and gave the specific example of gaming handhelds. Those are a perfect fit for the 9-33W power limits of the part. We’re looking at getting our hands on a Lunar Lake machine for independent testing sooner than later, so check back before long to see what we think.

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