Intel may be in the spotlight right now with rumors of an acquisition from Qualcomm, but there is more interest in the field in how the new Lunar Lake chips will perform when tested in the field

Lunar Lake is the codename given to the company's latest round of Intel Core Ultra 200V chips Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Plus laptop chips have a lot to prove as the company moves forward to ensure that its Windows CoPilot+ PCs can compete with Apple's M-series chips in the best MacBooks It has a lot to prove

Until now, we have not been able to accurately gauge how successful Intel has been due to a lack of testing However, we put several laptops equipped with Intel Core Ultra into our benchmarking lab to get a realistic idea of their performance

And the conclusion was that while general performance is on par with previous models, graphics and battery life are much improved This is because the latter can run the same general performance numbers at a lower wattage

We tested the new Intel Ultra Core 7 258V and Intel Ultra Core 9 288V on the Dell XPS 13 and Asus Zenbook S 14, respectively These machines went up against their two predecessors, the Intel Ultra Core 7 155H and Intel Core 9 185H, in single-core, multi-core, and graphics benchmark tests

The results are as follows:

As you can see, while there were improvements in the single-core and graphics tests, neither chip was able to improve on the previous generation's multi-core results

But let's see what happens to battery life when the new Intel Core Ultra 7 is compared to the older model

The results seem to reinforce the idea that the battery efficiency has almost doubled, making it the most power efficient chip Intel has ever produced

These are just the first tests we have been able to conduct with these new chips In time, we will be testing more laptops with these new processors to get the full picture of how they compare to Qualcomm and Apple's silicon

However, there are a few things to note before investing in your next laptop Manufacturers may brand their devices as Copilot+ PCs, but to qualify, the machine must have at least these new Intel Core Ultra 200V CPUs, at least 16GB of RAM, 256GB of flash storage, and an on-board NPU ( Neural Processing Unit) is required

Next, if you are into gaming, you will want to know that the Lunar Lake chips come with the Intel Arc integrated graphics chipset While this is nice and should help boost graphics performance (as shown in the table above), it still won't outperform a laptop with discrete graphics

Finally, these chips are built on the x86 architecture, which is different from the Arm-based chips produced by Qualcomm and Apple For a more in-depth look at why this is interesting, see “5 Things You Need to Know About Lunar Lake,” written by my colleague Alex Wawro

And don't worry, we'll bring you more Lunar Lake news and reviews once we get our hands on these devices