Intel: Good Things Come to Laptop Buyers Who Wait for the First Seven Answers to Qualcomm X Elite and AMD Core Ultra 200V Chips
Do good things come to laptop buyers who wait? Today, Intel is revealing its first nine answers to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite and AMD’s Strix Point laptop chips — and the company claims the new Core Ultra 200V lineup, formerly known as Lunar Lake, can meet or beat them in almost every way.
Another example: Intel says an Asus Zenbook S 14 with Intel can last multiple hours longer than an Asus Zenbook S 16 with AMD in office tasks, despite the AMD laptop’s slightly larger 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 is without using the XeSS upscaling from Intel. The company claims it is possible for games like Cyberpunk 2077, Spider-Man Remastered, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider to play at up to 65 frames per second with it. There was no graphical or resolution settings provided for the ray-traced claims.
These laptops should have good baked-in connectivity such as wi-fi, Bluetooth, and two ports of thunderbolt so they can charge, play music, and display 4K monitors.
The New Intel Ultra 200V Chips: A Cost Saver for an Entry-level Laptop Buyer Compared to the 15-core Vivobook S 15 and the Dell Inspiron 14 Plus
The Core Ultra 200V chips have just a few things in common, and there is no way to add more in the future. One of Intel’s key efficiency Improvements was getting rid of separate memory sticks or chips and placing them in theCPU package. Intel also did away with hyperthreading, the technique that let CPU cores run more than one thread.
There were different numbers ofCPU core and threads for Core i3 and Core i5. It has fewer dividing lines than ever, and Lunar Lake throws 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 at this moment.
But you don’t need to jump, and they may get better while you wait. Intel will not ship with Microsoft’s Copilot Plus artificial intelligence features like live caption and Windows Studios effects, which will be a free update starting in November.
While the new Qualcomm chips have all the same features as the 10-core and 12-core models, they’re decidedly weaker in some ways — especially graphics. They have less than half the power for games and other graphical apps. And while they all feature the same 45 TOPS of AI performance from their NPU, they’ve also got 12MB less CPU cache.
Would you want to save money this way? I think I could see it in an entry-level laptop buyer, particularly if they were actually saving $400, as it might be the case with the Vivobook 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 the storage is sacrificed, as you can get 512Gig instead of 1 TB.
The 12-core Asus Vivobook S 15 is on sale for $1,100 or less, and the 12-core Dell Inspiron 14 Plus is on sale for $899.