Intel’s Lunar Lake excels in battery life

Lunar Lake
Lunar Lake

Intel’s latest entry into the laptop processor market, the Lunar Lake series, is designed to compete directly with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon and AMD’s Ryzen processors. We tested Intel’s Core Ultra Series 2 (Lunar Lake), particularly the Core Ultra 7 258V chip, to see how it fares against competition. Lunar Lake is marketed as a power-efficient yet performance-capable alternative to Snapdragon chips, focusing on delivering exceptional battery life and a robust embedded GPU.

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For our tests, Intel provided an Asus ZenBook S14 equipped with the Lunar Lake chip.

We ran various benchmarks to compare its performance, including comparisons to AMD’s mobile Ryzen processors and Intel’s own previous-gen Meteor Lake CPUs. For synthetic benchmarks, we used Cinebench R23 and Cinebench 2024.

Cinebench 2024 has a specialized Arm version, while R23 runs via emulator software translating X86 instructions into Arm code. When specifically coded for Arm, Snapdragon performed significantly better, pushing the Lunar Lake chip down the rankings.

Interestingly, Intel’s older Meteor Lake processor often outperformed Lunar Lake, suggesting Intel prioritized battery life over raw performance in this generation.

According to data from Macworld, Apple’s M3 chip in their MacBook Pro and MacBook Air 15 they secured impressive single-core and multi-threaded performance, showing Intel’s Lunar Lake leading only in multi-threaded performance.

Lunar Lake excels in battery efficiency

Tests showed that Lunar Lake’s performance significantly drops when running on a battery compared to when plugged in.

The disparity was a stark reminder of the performance cost for extended battery life. Snapdragon processors showed more consistent performance regardless of power source. Intel’s new Xe2 graphics engine in Lunar Lake provided a rare bright spot.

In tests such as Time Spy and Steel Nomad Light, the integrated GPU delivered commendable performances, suggesting potential for decent gaming and graphics-heavy applications on the go. Using benchmarks from Procyon’s Office Productivity suite, which includes real-world tasks within Microsoft Office, we found minimal differences between the various platforms except for the significant drop-off when running on a battery for Intel’s Core Ultra/Lunar Lake 258V. In a computationally intensive Handbrake test—transcoding a video—the Core Ultra 7 258V took significantly longer than AMD’s Ryzen to complete, reinforcing the trend that Intel may be sacrificing performance for battery efficiency.

Intel’s Lunar Lake series, represented by the Core Ultra 7 258V in our tests, focuses heavily on battery life and integrated graphics performance. While it doesn’t always match up to Snapdragon or Ryzen processors in raw performance, it offers a balanced mix of efficient power consumption and decent GPU capabilities. With further optimization, future iterations could better capture the mobile processor market’s interests, particularly for users valuing battery life without a significant trade-off in day-to-day performance.

Maya Johnson

Maya is the editor-in-chief of KillerStartups.com. She provides value to early-stage entrepreneurs through content and her weekly newsletter. Reach her at [email protected]

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