Intel has finally revealed the exact date that its new Lunar Lake laptop Us will be unleashed into the world, with the Intel Lunar Lake series arriving in shops on Tuesday, September 3, 2024. The new Core Ultra 200V chips contain more powerful AI processing parts compared to Intel's current Meteor Lake/Core Ultra 100 chips, and they're expected to provide improved battery life too, although they have at least one notable downside.
The new contenders to power the Intel, with rumors that it's set to lay off 10,000 employees, while its desktop chips are being heavily criticized for instability in games. If Lunar Lake can provide a big boost in battery life and plenty of power, it could be one positive step in the company's recovery.
Lunar Lake is the name of the architecture that powers a range of processor types, with the September 3 launch being specifically for the Intel Core Ultra 200V variant of the chips. There are currently nine known variants in this range, topped by the Core Ultra 288V and finishing with the Core Ultra 226V.
However, all these chips have the same core count of four P-Cores and four E-Cores, with the main variations between them being their amount of cache, their clock speeds, and their memory configurations.
The latter is a crucial point as these chips, like AMD's Ryzen AI 300 processors, use a pre-allocated amount of memory that's soldered to the motherboard. That's in contrast to most gaming laptops, which have -replaceable memory in the form of SODIMM memory sticks. The predefined memory amount in theory saves space and has the potential to reduce power consumption in order to save battery life, but it's a definite downside.
With only four P-Cores and four E-Cores, the other obvious aspect of these processors is that they're not super powerful. Again, this ties into them being aimed at ultraportable laptops, and they're a direct answer to Apple and Qualcomm's Arm-based Us that have been shown to have incredible battery life.
As part of the processor launch, which will eventually include the MSI Claw 8 AI+ gaming handheld), Intel will be having a live stream where it will "reveal details on the new processors breakthrough x86 power efficiency, exceptional core performance, massive leaps in graphics performance and [Lunar Lake's] unmatched AI compute power."
This news follows previous reports that Intel had delayed the release of Lunar Lake from its original Q3 launch window (July to September) to a Q4 launch (October to December), which would have meant all these shiny new ultraportable laptops with long-battery life would have missed the back to school buying window.
It's still possible that Intel and its laptop partners will miss out on a lot of sales if stock isn't available to buy immediately on the September 3 launch date, though. After all, it doesn't leave long before students will have to be back in class, but at least it now stands a chance.
As for gaming on these new laptops, Intel is making bold claims about the graphics power of these new processors, thanks to its GPU hou to eight of its new Xe2 Battlemage graphics cores. These won't be powerhouse gaming laptops akin to the Razer Blade 16, for instance, but you should be able to do some light gaming on them.
With AMD also packing surprisingly powerful graphics into its latest Ryzen AI 300 processors, we're reaching ever closer to a stage where regular low-power laptops can actually be used for gaming, making the next few months a potentially exciting time to a thin and light machine.