Lunar Lake at 17W - Windows Laptops NEEDED This

Intel finally has an answer for ultra low power thin and light laptops. While Lunar Lake can perform well at 30W, that's not its best performance per watt setting. Rather, what the Ultra 7 256V and 258V can do at jus 15W to 17W is absolutely crazy...but can these Windows laptops finally win vs Apple's Macbook Air? Well....

TIMESTAMPS
0:00 - Lunar Lake's TRUE Strength
0:34 - Finding Low Power Laptops is HARD
1:30 - Meet the Competition
2:21 - AMD AI is MIA..
3:24 - An Underserved Ultra Low Power Market
3:47 - Sponsor Spot (Antec)
4:19 - A NEW Battery Life Metric (Min / Wh)
4:53 - Real World Battery Life
7:08 - Lunar Lake ISN'T A Battery Life Champ
7:20 - Synthetic Performance Testing at 17W
8:21 - Office Productivity Testing
8:46 - Creator & Multi Core Workload Testing
9:37 - Video Editing & Output is CRAZY GOOD
10:15 - Performance on BATTERY
11:04 - Synthetic Gaming Benchmarks
12:43 - Gaming Framerates
13:41 - Lunar Lake at 17W = Game Changer??

Review unit provided free of charge by ASUS as a loaned item or purchased by Hardware Canucks. This video is sponsored by Antec.

As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.

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[Deeptesh]

Most don't realize the absolute decades of legacy stuff x86 still supports out of the box while maintaining the efficiency it does. Intel and AMD are making CPUs that are going to be used for each and every usecase by individuals and 100 year old companies without caveats.
Apple's CPUs(and also Snapdragon) are targeting their products towards a far limited usage criteria and ace those.
I'm totally fine with the versatility of x86 especially with the balance of performance and efficiency from AMD Zen 5.

[djayjp]

Keep in mind that ~2 watts is used for the on package ram, so LL is actually running at 15w vs 19-20w of the others.

[sachafievet]

Wow, this one isn't sponsored content. Honestly I'm so close to stop subbing for this channel and I hope you trully listen to your fans. I reaaally liked your content and cinematography, but this year has been, sorry to say it, quite disappointing. I'm just 1 viewer I know, but I'm just concerned. No hard feelings, nothing personal, thank you for this video.

[akin]

Intel Lunar Lake for the win for office worker laptops. Full X86 software compatibility, great battery life, good single core CPU performance, and good gaming capabilities at 1080p resolution. Even if you are not an office worker and want a personal laptop for general purpose while traveling, it is still an excellent choice.

For more extreme needs, the M3 Max or Dell Precision 7000 should suffice. M3 Pro MBP or Asus ZenBook S 16 (Ryzen AI 9 370) should handle all things in-between.

[Deeptesh]

Why don't you use a tool like UXTU and choose your TDP values to plot a simple power scaling chart for AMD and Intel. It's very easy to do and avoids any confusion.

[aras_aras_aras_aras]

The figure in the beginning (0:11) is quite misleading because it shows performance per watt for Intel Core Ultra 9 but only the max-performance result for every other processor. Max-performance results are relevant only for maximum load (like these benchmarks). Processors run at much lower wattages most of the time.

When reviewers tested AMD HX 370 at lower power levels (~20W), it can beat the Intel Core Ultra 9 in term of performance at the same power level, hence, is more efficient at that power level. This can easily be simulated because all AMD and Intel motherboards allow the CPU and GPU power to be limited to a given wattage.

Nevertheless, Intel Core Ultra 9 beats AMD and other Intel processors in real-world battery tests. This might be due to its higher efficiency at even lower wattages, e.g. 5-10 Watt, which are commonly used in office work. At these lower wattages, other components (RAM, chipset, controllers, screen, etc) affect the battery life significantly, so comparing the efficiency of processors becomes much more difficult.

[tonyk]

I think the ryzen's issue is Acer's problem
I have a 5800u swift with 53wh battery, it only last 4~5 hours while playing youtube or video streaming

[tockar]

Any chance for a M1 revisit in 2024? I would love to see that vs these laptops.

[macheerouistrash]

Mike, nice to see you and the Hardware Canucks team shedding a light on this issue. If you probably remember, the reason why we have most "low power CPU" at 30 watt is simply because Intel, AMD and laptop manufacturers at one point of time decides that they could now fit a 28W CPU on a chassis that usually can only hold 15W. This happens around the time of Tiger Lake (11th gen Intel) and the first time HS series CPU (AMD, around 5th or 6th gen ryzen laptop) comes out. Around this time, their efficiency and power sweet spot hangs around the upper end of the spectrum, so when the opportunity to pull this off arrives, it was a no-brainer for everyone involved since they could market the machines as being way more performant than standard 15W laptops at the time within the same chassis, and only slightly worse battery life.

I've observed that on most cases, any Intel CPU, even those at desktop that we labeled as super power hungry like the 14900K, usually shines in idle/lower power consumption state compared to AMD's counterpart in the same class (like 7950X for example). Those e-cores does have an advantage on scenarios like this, so if what one does on their PC is mostly low power stuff like just browsing, opening discord, doing office work etc., Intel could have a bigger advantage. But for average gaming power consumption and peak performance per watt, AMD is still king. This could probably explain why AMD is so popular around handheld consoles since they could dish out more performance at a constant 25-30W scenario because all they had to do is mostly just gaming.

[hananas]

In my opinion this is one of the most exciting CPU releases in many years, I mean these little CPUs only need less than 20 watts to do more than what my old XPS can do with 80-90 watts!

[nickd]

Based on the overwhelming number of sponsored videos recently I had almost entirely written off this channel. And even in the first couple seconds of this video it sounded like another sponsored one, but the description didn’t mention a sponsor so I’ll keep watching.

[pranavsivakumar]

as someone who has owned an acer laptop, i am pretty damn sure that the awful battery life is acer's fault. they give 1 or 2 bios updates like 2 months after launch and then they dont support it anymore. they also have a track record of good laptops on paper but they underperform and the chassis quality is some of the worst

[djayjp]

You can also reduce the wattage or undervolt its new peers, to make it apples to apples.

[DanielSacilotto]

HP Aero 13 series used to have a 15w output if memory serves me right, using Ryzen 5000 series. Don't know if this changed in later revisions.

[BreeHorsfall]

I value battery life alive all else ina laptop. And the fact that I'm legitimately considering an intel laptop for rue best battery life in 2024 is just....wild. but I'm very impressed with what they've done and I'm excited to see the laptops lunar lake comes in. 😌🖤

[TheGreatBobby]

Awesome video. I'm not in the market for a laptop, but I enjoy watching these videos just because of the sublime production quality. Your graphs are the best.

[davitdavid]

I feel like 6-8 hours is eanugh battery life for a day, 10 is pushing it. If my laptop has a 70ish wh battery and can do that while also having a good igpu experience it will fit me better. Plus x86 is too versatile to give up.
The thinkpad t14 series also seem to feature a lot of u series cpus for further comparisons
To really capitalise on efficiency they should do something like fansless designs again to drop price and appeal to low maintenence users.

[Gustavo_St]

Quite analytical! Very good indeed. Thank you!

[drewnewby]

I hope you're right Mike, but I'm skeptical of Ultra 5 pricing, and Strix Point coming to market with affordable SKUs in the near future.

[M]

I am using Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition right now and I have mostly only good things to say about it.
But at 1900 USD as it costs in Sweden, you would want to have an OLED display rather than LCD. While that isn't much of a problem at home when I connect to an external display, I still wish it came with an OLED display