You need to know everything that Intel has to say about the first Lunar Lake laptop CPUs

Spectroscopy and Gameplay With the Snapdragon X Plus Lunar Lake Laptops (S14), Dell Inspire 14 and Asus Zenbook S

Qualcomm launched its first big wave of Windows laptops this summer at $999 and up — but a new, somewhat weaker chip could soon shave off at least $100. Today, the company’s announcing its first 8-core Snapdragon X Plus chips, which will feature in a new Asus Zenbook S 15 and Dell Inspiron 14 that’ll retail for $899 each.

The Intel Zenbook S 14 with Intel has a larger 78Wh battery pack, but it can last multiple hours longer than the Asus Zenbook S 16 with the smaller 78Wh battery pack.

That’s a 44 percent improvement, which is a giant leap for Intel, if true. (Never mind that the Qualcomm version of the XPS 13 quotes a slightly longer life of up to 27 hours.)

That does not include using Intel’s XeSS upscaling. With it, the company claims even ray-traced games are within reach of its integrated GPU, such as 45fps in Cyberpunk 2077, 57fps in Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered, and 66fps in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Resolution and graphical settings weren’t provided for the ray-traced claims.

Like we’ve discussed previously, these Lunar Lake laptops should have excellent baked-in connectivity: Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, and a minimum of two Thunderbolt 4 ports to guarantee speedy USB-C connectivity, charging, and up to three 4K monitors.

Comparisons of Intel’s Ultra 200V CPUs with the 30 years of Intel: a case study for the price of ultra-high performance laptops

Every one of the Intel Core Ultra 200V chips has an internal amount of processing power with no way to add more in the future. One of Intel’s key efficiency improvements was getting rid of separate memory sticks or chips, baking it into the CPU package instead. Intel did away with hyperthreading, a technique that let the processor run more than one thread.

When Core i3 was used, it meant different numbers of CPUs cores and threads. Lunar lake has less dividing lines than ever, throwing that out the window.

As you can see, only 300MHz of turbo clock and 100MHz of GPU max frequency separate Intel’s flagship Ultra 9 288V from its lesser Ultra 7 258V — but the wattage boost might matter a lot more than MHz for performance. Can not say yet!

They may get better while you wait, if you don’t jump. Intel says they won’t even ship with Microsoft’s own Copilot Plus AI features like live captions and Windows Studio Effects; those will arrive as a free update starting in November, says Intel.

The new eight-core chips are only about 80 percent as powerful as the company’s 12 core chips, and on a par with the 10 core chips for productivity. The graphics scores are cut in half with the 8-core.

Would you like to save money this way? I can see it for entry-level laptops, particularly if you’re actually saving $400, as the case might be for the asus vistabook S 15. That laptop originally cost $1,300 with the 12-core chip, but it’s just $900 with the 8-core, despite featuring the same big 70 watt-hour battery and 3K 120Hz OLED screen. Half of the storage is sacrificed, as you’ll only get 512GB instead of 1 block of storage.

But sales might make the pricing gap smaller than it appears: The 12-core Asus Vivobook S 15 is already on sale for $1,100 or lower, and Dell is already selling the a 12-core model of its Inspiron 14 Plus for $899.