Intel Lunar Lake is one of the company’s most anticipated CPU launches in recent years, despite it being a laptop-only chip and not an upgrade for desktop gaming PCs. That’s because it not only offers greatly reduced power consumption, resulting in much longer laptop battery life than older Intel CPUs, but its GPU is genuinely gaming-capable too.
The new CPUs launching today will be finding their way into some of the best gaming laptops with thin and light designs. Laptops with dedicated separate GPUs will still provide the best gaming performance, but if you’re looking for a laptop that is portable, will last a long time, and can do a little bit of gaming, there’s a new option from Intel in town.
Intel Lunar Lake is the name of the company’s newest laptop CPU architecture, and it will be coming to market as a range of Intel Core 200V CPUs, also referred to as the Intel Core Ultra Series 2 range. These include the likes of the Intel Core Ultra 9 288V and Ultra 7 258V, which are now powering laptops such as the Asus Zenbook S 14 and Dell XPS 13 9350.
A total of eight CPU cores are integrated into these new CPUs, with four each of the company’s powerful P-Cores and low-power E-Cores. Intriguingly, the entire range has this exact same configuration, with no higher-end chips with more cores, or lower-end chips with fewer cores. Crucially, though, the E-Cores in Lunar Lake are much more powerful than those in the company’s previous thin and light laptop architecture, Meteor Lake, so you’re not missing out on too much CPU grunt.
However, clock speeds vary, as does the capability of the integrated GPU, with higher-end chips offering the Arc 140V GPU and lower-end models offering the Arc 120V. The Arc 140V versions have eight of Intel’s new Xe2 Battlemage GPU cores, running at up to 2GHz, and Intel claims they can deliver 1080p gaming performance. That equates to over 60fps in games such as Forza Horizon 5, Diablo 4, and Fortnite when running at 1080p.
Meanwhile, early testing by sites such as Club386 reported battery lifetimes of over 20 hours while watching video. Several hours of gaming were also possible.
We’ll be testing the latest thin and light gaming laptops ourselves to gauge the capabilities of these new chips for ourselves, while seeing how they compare to the latest AMD Ryzen AI 300 chips, as well as Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X series laptops. In the meantime, though, if you’re looking for a desktop processor upgrade, these remain our best gaming CPU choices.
