Two issues may be true for Intel’s new Core Extremely 200-series processors, codenamed Lunar Lake: They are often each spectacular and embarrassing.
Spectacular as a result of they carry out moderately properly, regardless of some regressions and inconsistencies, and since they offer Intel’s battery life a much-needed enhance as the corporate competes with new Snapdragon X Elite processors from Qualcomm and Ryzen AI chips from AMD. It’s going to even be Intel’s first chip to satisfy Microsoft’s efficiency necessities for the Copilot+ options in Home windows 11.
Embarrassing as a result of, to get right here, Intel had to make use of one other firm’s manufacturing services to provide a aggressive chip.
Intel claims that it is a momentary association, only a bump within the street as the corporate prepares to scale up its upcoming 18A manufacturing course of so it will probably deliver its personal chip manufacturing again in-house. And perhaps that is true! However years of producing misfires (and early stories of troubles with 18A) have made me reflexively skeptical of any timelines the corporate provides for its manufacturing operations. And Intel has outsourced a few of its manufacturing on the identical time it’s desperately making an attempt to get different chip designers to fabricate their merchandise in Intel’s factories.
This can be a evaluation of Intel’s latest cellular silicon by means of an Asus Zenbook UX5406S with a Core Extremely 7 258V offered by Intel, not a chronicle of Intel’s manufacturing decline and ongoing monetary woes. I’ll principally concentrate on telling you whether or not the chip performs properly and whether or not you can purchase it. Nevertheless it’s a uncommon state of affairs, the place whether or not it is a stable chip just isn’t a slam-dunk win for Intel, which could issue into our total evaluation.
About Lunar Lake
Let’s speak in regards to the composition of Lunar Lake, in short.
Like final 12 months’s Meteor Lake-based Core Extremely 100 chips, Lunar Lake is a set of chiplets stitched collectively by way of Intel’s Foveros know-how. In Meteor Lake, Intel used this to mix a number of silicon dies manufactured by completely different firms—Intel made the compute tile the place the principle CPU cores had been housed, whereas TSMC made the tiles for graphics, I/O, and different features.