Intel's new Lunar Lake CPU beats current-gen gaming handhelds: improved IPC, more efficient

Intel's new Core Ultra 200V series "Lunar Lake" CPUs are slowly coming to the market, you can read our review on the ASUS Zenbook S14 laptop powered by Lunar Lake here, with some more benchmarks and comparisons from Geekerwan.

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With just 15W of power, the new Intel Core Ultra 7 258V benched against the Valve Steam Deck and ASUS ROG Ally (the Z1 Extreme variant) in a 15W constrained TDP mode, and running at 720p resolution to show what games can expect from a Lunar Lake chip inside of a gaming handheld.

Intel's new Lunar Lake chips has 12W of power through its SoC and on-package memory, with the competitors' APUs using around 9W of power, with the motherboard taking some additional power that drives the same 15W limt as the Lunar Lake chips.

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Geekerwan's benchmarks show that Intel's new Core Ultra 7 258V "Lunar Lake" is up to 67% faster than AMD's new Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 "Strix Point" with the same 15W power limit. The 1% low FPS is higher than the average FPS on the new RDNA 3.5-based Strix Point APU, and the first-gen Alchemist Xe-LPG processor... some very, very impressive results.

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But man... Cyberpunk 2077 on the new Intel Core Ultra 7 258V is excellent: 28FPS average compared to just 11FPS on the AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme (ASUS ROG Ally), and the 13FPS out of the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 "Strix Point" APU. This is at 720p remember, but it's a test of the 15W power efficiency of Intel's new Lunar Lake chip.

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What about when the Lunar Lake CPU is unconstrained? Geekerwan tested the Core Ultra 7 258V "Lunar Lake" CPU using up to 30W at peak, compared to the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 "Strix Point" APU using up to 80W, and the previous-gen Core Ultra 9 185H "Meteor Lake" chip peaking at 90W.