Tested: Intel's Lunar Lake chip wants you to forget Qualcomm laptops exist

Great battery life, mediocre performance, surprisingly decent gaming: That is how Intel's Lunar Lake chip stacks up.

- MARK HACHMAN

Lunar Lake is Intel’s Snapdragon killer. Intel’s Core Ultra Series 2 (Lunar Lake) was specifically designed to emphasize low power, but with competitive performance. In this it somewhat succeeds, though the Core Ultra 7 258V chip I tested can still run a distant second, or third, behind AMD’s mobile Ryzen processors. But Lunar Lake also provides incredibly good, Snapdragon-like battery life with a powerful, embedded GPU capable of playing yesterday’s top-tier games.

Intel supplied us with a Lunar Lake–powered Asus ZenBook S14 laptop for review, and we’ve spent the last week or so testing it to answer the question: Of the AMD Ryzen AI 300 (fave.co/4cpbSEg), Intel’s Lunar Lake, and the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite (fave.co/40topBX), which is the best laptop processor so far in 2024? And how does Lunar Lake compare to its predecessor, Meteor Lake?

We’ve run all three chips through a number of benchmarks—with separate tests run while plugged in and on battery power. We think it’s important that you know the maximum performance potential of these laptop processors as well as how much performance is lost to keep your laptop up and running when unplugged.

Intel launched Lunar Lake (fave.co/ 4gfDRcx) at the Computex 2024 show in Taiwan, where executives promised a “no-compromise experience (fave.co/ 3BD9v3z).” The Asus ZenBook S14 and other Lunar Lake and Ryzen AI 300 laptops now qualify as Copilot+ PCs, even though a Windows update to enable their AI features (fave.co/3Nktjvm) won’t occur until October.

HOW WE TESTED INTEL’S LUNAR LAKE