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Microsoft going all in on ARM with its reworked Windows 11 and an all-new lineup of laptops powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X series of System-on-Chip (SoC) processors. With the claims Microsoft and Qualcomm are making, it’s going to be a significant leap for Windows laptops that finally puts them on par with Apple silicone in terms of performance and power efficiency.
Not to be left behind, processor giant Intel also announced its Lunar Lake lineup of processors. These new processors are just as powerful as Qualcomm’s offerings, if not more. And if you were to believe Intel, these new chips are a game changer.
What Are Intel’s Lunar Lake CPUs?
Lunar Lake is Intel’s next-generation lineup of x86 laptop processors, boasting significant performance and power efficiency gains over their 13th-Gen Meteor Lake predecessors. The most striking change is the presence of anNPU promising 48 TOPS(Tera Operations Per Second), combined with a GPU with over 67 TOPS.
This means that the new lineup will be able to deliver over 100 TOPS of combined AI compute performance, making them more than capable of Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC tag. The new chips are also significantly more powerful than Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X lineup of ARM SoCs, powering the current lineup of Microsoft AI PCs.
Keep in mind that while these new processors are x86 in architecture, Intel also uses an SoC design. This means that the CPU, NPU, and an Xe2 GPU are all packaged on a single chip. TheNPU and GPU are two very important aspectsof the new AI features that Windows is promising.
An SoC-based design has its pros and cons, though. For starters, you get features like integrated Thunderbolt 4 (guaranteed two ports on every Lunar Lake system), Wi-Fi 7e, Bluetooth 5.4, and built-in ray tracing, in addition to the overall package being smaller and lighter.
However, Intel’s Lunar Lake chips bundle RAM on the chip, meaning you’ll have to pick the amount of RAM you want while purchasing, with no option to upgrade later.
Options include either 16GB or 32GB LPDDR5X memory, which should be fine for the foreseeable future. If you want more memory, you’ll have to wait for Intel’s upcoming Arrow Lake architecture. Additionally, RAM speed can be dynamically adjusted to reduce Wi-Fi interference.
Lunar Lake also has a new chip structure, dropping the Low Power Efficiency (LP-E) cores that debuted in Meteor Lake chips. The new lineup features four “Lion Cove” P-cores paired with four “Skymount” E-cores.
Intel claims that the new E-cores are more powerful and efficient than 2023’s P-cores at usual laptop clock speeds. This translates to around 20 percent more single-threaded performance. The P-cores also offer a 14 percent improvement in performance at the same clock speeds. Additionally, these E-cores can also scale up to double or even quadruple the performance in single-threaded vs multi-threaded performance tests.
The Xe2 GPU included in the new chip also brings a fair share of performance. You get eight second-generation Xe-cores, eight enhanced ray tracing units, support for newer XMX engines, and an overall 1.5 times improvement over GPUs included with the Meteor Lake processors in 3DMark Time Spy.
Note that this doesn’t mean you’ll be crushing games like Cyberpunk on your integrated GPU. However, older and indie games should work well. Laptops featuring Lunar Lake chips should offer better gaming performance across the board, with the addition of a dedicated GPU bringing them up to the mark.
That said, Intel hasn’t given out any real-world performance metrics at the moment, so we’re going to have to wait for Lunar Lake to hit the markets before we get a sense of just how much performance has improved.
What About Battery Life?
If there’s one buzzword around the next generation of Windows laptops, it’s battery life. Generally speaking, ARM chips provide better power efficiency than their x86 counterparts, resulting in better battery life figures. However, Intel seems to have its act together.
Remember the baked-in RAM we just talked about? That contributes to battery life as well. Baking memory on the package reduces the power consumption of moving data around by 40 percent.
Intel claims[PDF] its new E-cores run as fast as the older LP-E cores but with one-third of the power consumption. There’s also a new thread director called Enhanced Intel Thread Director. Basically, it works to ensure as many tasks as possible are run on these E-cores to help achieve Intel’s battery life figures—up to 60 percent better battery life than Meteor Lake processors.
Intel also has future plans for the new thread director. The company plans to implement AI-based scheduling hints and enable cross-IP scheduling within Windows 11. These improvements will translate to overall better workload management, ensuring that power-hungry P-cores remain unused as long as possible.
Intel Lunar Lake vs. Qualcomm Snapdragon X vs. Apple M3
Considering that both Lunar Lake and Snapdragon X series chips haven’t been tested extensively at the moment, it’s difficult to compare their performance to that of Apple M3, a chip that’s been in the market for a while now. Moreover, Apple has also debuted its M4 chip, which will make matters tough for Intel and Qualcomm.Comparing CPUs is tough, especially if you want to do it the right way.
While the Snapdragon X lineup has started hitting the markets with laptops from multiple manufacturers, Intel’s Lunar Lake laptops won’t arrive until the 2024 holiday season.
Qualcomm has claimed that the Snapdragon X Elite is about 21 percent faster than the Apple M3 chip in multi-threaded performance. With Intel aiming to beat Qualcomm, you can expect Lunar Lake PCs to operate somewhere between Apple’s M3 and M4 chips. The same performance figures should apply to Qualcomm as well.
Please keep in mind that this comes with a very big asterisk. We don’t know much about thermal performance on Intel’s and Qualcomm’s offerings at the moment. And while both manufacturers make big claims about power efficiency, we’ve yet to see real-world figures.
Software optimization also plays a very big role here. Windows 11 has been rebuilt for ARM, so Qualcomm has got its part of the pie sorted. What remains to be seen is how x86 Windows 11 versions run on Lunar Lake.
One thing I can say with confidence is that it’s going to be a close fight on all three chips in terms of performance and battery life. The massive battery life divide we used to see between Windows and macOS laptops is diminishing, and performance is also catching up.
