Image: Mark Hachman / IDG
As far as brands go, Intel has etched itself deeply into my mind as a brand I can trust. To say I get a little excited with each successive chip release is an understatement, especially when they offer substantial performance gains over previous generations.
But I haven’t arrived at that point overnight. In one way or another I’ve been enjoying the fruits of the company’s labor for decades — starting with the Intel 386 processor which powered many hours of Wolfenstein 3D gaming.
Decades later that trust has been validated time and time again in my job as a reviewer of PC hardware… But, as much as I hate to say it: not so much of late.
It’s a situation that doesn’t sit right with me, hence why I’m rooting for a successful Intel Core Ultra Series 2 (Lunar Lake) reception now that laptops with the chips have already started to ship (as of September 24). It’s off to a great start, as our initial Lunar Lake deep-dive shows.
Why Intel needs a golden ticket
Suffice it to say, the last 24 months haven’t been the greatest for Intel.
One big issue the company has faced has been a problem with some of its desktop processors. In case you’ve been living in a cave, back in 2022 users found stability problems with some of the company’s high-powered 13th- and 14th-generation desktop CPUs, which experienced spontaneous crashes and/or blue screens.
It goes without saying that a blue screen is the last thing gamers who’ve forked out serious cashola want to see when they’re just one swipe away from finishing off the Supreme Inspector boss in a game of Black Myth: Wukong.
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To unpack that issue a little more and why it caused such a stir, it wasn’t so much the fact that there was a hardware problem that hit consumer confidence so badly, but the fact that it took the company so long to diagnose and offer a fix for it.
Although the problem was first reported in December 2022, the root cause (Vmin shift instability) was only discovered in July 2024, more than 19 months later. Then, still, Intel only released the first urgent update to the microcode to fix the problem in August this year.
The sense of confusion about the issue was only heightened by the media circus that surrounded it. Reports played out like a hard-to-watch beat-up scene in a Rocky film, with Intel receiving blow after blow like Sylvester Stallone’s character Rocky Balboa boxing against a more muscular opponent.
The Intel stability issue affected some 13th- and 14th-generation desktop chips running at 65W or above.
Intel
The blows came from multiple sources, but the ones that hit home the most were the ones from super smart tech folks who seemed to have the upper hand in suggesting a possible cause of the problem before Intel could put a finger on it.
But that hasn’t been the only issue Intel has had to deal with recently. To rub salt into its wounds, two of the company’s recent processor releases, its Meteor Lake and Raptor Lake refresh, received only a lukewarm reception.
To be fair, these CPUs were dropped into one of the most competitive CPU markets we’ve seen in a long time. They came amid some of the most powerful AI-capable and affordable AMD Ryzen chips we’ve seen to date — not to mention whole new chip types for Windows 11 laptops from Qualcomm.
The latter’s entry into the market has presented a kind of existential dilemma for Intel. Qualcomm has shown that — yes, Arm chips can successfully run Windows 11 PCs with similar performance to Intel chips and with only minimal compatibility issues.
What’s more, Windows laptops running off these SoCs benefit from unprecedented battery life, sometimes double that of laptops running off Intel’s Meteor Lake chips.
Is Lunar Lake Intel’s white wizard?
I chose the Rocky Balboa analogy because he’s almost always down and out at the start of each Rocky film but then comes back with a vengeance. It’s what I expect Intel will do, luck being on its side.
In my view, the company’s new mobile-first Lunar Lake chip is revolutionary enough to put the company firmly back on top in the chip game.
Lunar Lake is a fresh and exciting technology based on a brand-new microarchitecture which includes new P-cores, E-cores, and Battlemage graphics and a new NPU. The new system-on-system design triples the size but quadruples the performance of the processor’s AI accelerator.
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Intel promises Lunar Lake will deliver significant performance gains over rival chips while also providing up to 30 percent reduction in power draw. That means these chips will be extremely zippy but should deliver battery life on par with, or longer than the lengthy ones seen in Snapdragon powered AI laptops.
On top of that, Lunar Lake’s AI processing power looks to be formidable. To be sure, it features an NPU with up to 45 TOPS, which equals that delivered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite chip. It will, however, outperform the X Elite in this regard, thanks to another 60 TOPS AI processing power delivered by the chip’s integrated Xe2 graphics component.
Admittedly, it has only one drawback that I can see: That is, since the RAM will be built onto the same package as the CPU, you’ll be limited to a maximum of 32GB, which may not suit some power users. Then again, not everyone needs 64GB RAM in a laptop anyway.
Further reading: Tested: Intel’s Lunar Lake wants you to forget Qualcomm laptops exist
Author: Dominic Bayley, PCWorld Australia Editor
Based in Australia, Dominic Bayley is a hardcore tech enthusiast. His PCWorld focus is on PC gaming hardware: laptops, mice, headsets and keyboards.
