Lunar Lake First Tests: Intel's AI-Ready Core Ultra 2 Chip Posts Nearly 24-Hour Battery Life

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We’ve endured a long leadup to Intel launching its Lunar Lake processor platform, but laptops with these second-generation Core Ultra chips are finally in our hands. And now, we have first-hand performance testing results.

The Core Ultra brand—denoting processors with onboard neural processing units (NPUs) for local AI tasks—launched at the end of 2023 with the first-generation Meteor Lake chips. Lunar Lake processors follow up with superior power and capacity for even more trillions of operations per second (TOPS), which should translate to faster and more efficient AI results.

Having recently revamped our entire benchmark suite to adapt to modern PCs—including AI workload testing—we’re in an ideal place to judge Lunar Lake’s efficiency versus other modern platforms. For testing, we used an Asus Zenbook S 14 equipped with a Core Ultra 7 258V processor, which revealed standard-setting battery life and a potentially huge leap in NPU performance.

Lunar Lake Has Landed

I won’t spend too much time here explaining the current CPU landscape or the Lunar Lake architecture, as we’ve extensively covered these topics in the leadup to the launch. If you want to get up to speed, check out our coverage of , , and the laptop chips. The table below shows off the whole Core Ultra 2 stack.

As you can see, the Core Ultra 7 258V sits in the upper middle of this batch of chips, with eight cores (four Performance cores, four low-power Efficient cores) and eight threads. As detailed previously, the core types occupy the same chip alongside the NPU, with the low-power E-cores designated for lower-priority tasks.

AI tasks on Windows are largely inherently background workloads that run behind your main task; think of video call enhancements, audio improvements, and other low-demand asks. The NPU can handle these workloads, freeing the processor's CPU to run the main applications (your browser, conferencing software, and other active work apps) without slowdown. Some creative applications, say for editing, will lean more on the NPU to create or clean up images, but the former is the primary reason for the multi-unit architecture.

Now Testing: Intel Core Ultra 2 vs. the Field

Let's see what Lunar Lake can do in retail systems. I put the Zenbook S14 through our recently revamped benchmark suite, which covers a range of productivity, multimedia, and AI workloads; I’ll explain each batch of tests before the results so you have context for the numbers.

Productivity, Content Creation, and AI Tests

Our primary overall benchmark, UL's PCMark 10, puts a system through its paces in productivity apps ranging from web browsing to word processing and spreadsheet work. Its Full System Drive subtest measures a PC's storage throughput. Three more tests are CPU-centric or processor-intensive: Cinebench 2024 uses Maxon's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene; Geekbench 6.3 Pro by Primate Labs simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning; and we see how long it takes the video editing tool HandBrake 1.8 to convert a 12-minute clip from 4K to 1080p resolution.

Next, PugetBench for Creators rates a PC's image editing prowess with various automated operations in Adobe Photoshop 25. Finally, Geekbench AI and UL's Procyon Computer Vision test are two of the first AI processing benchmarks. (Our use of these AI tests is still in development and, regardless, cannot be compared among processing platforms. See our page on how we test laptops for more on that.)

Throughout the productivity and content creation tests, the Core Ultra 7 258V performed well compared with the competition. You'll see no visible Lunar Lake superiority on these tests, with the Zenbook falling in line with the others on most of these results. It was rarely the fastest performer, except for the Photoshop test, while HandBrake was an outlier in the other direction—the slowest time posted.

As for the AI tests, we still take these results with a heaping grain of salt, though Intel has claimed triple-digit NPU performance gains with Lunar Lake. AI benchmarking is in its nascent stages, and cross-platform comparisons become even trickier; separating outlier results and marked improvement at this stage can be difficult. The Procyon Computer Vision Intel OpenVINO benchmark showed a clear leap in the integer-grade results across the CPU, GPU, and NPU tests; meanwhile, this laptop's Geekbench AI results were actually lower than the competition.

This partially demonstrates the opaque nature of benchmarking this developing field, but the leap in NPU performance is arguably delivering just as Lunar Lake should. Our results were individually in line with what Intel itself has produced, and outside of synthetic test scenarios, these Core Ultra 2 chips have much higher TOPS ceilings that should enable efficient NPU background performance.

Graphics Tests

We challenge laptops' graphics with a quartet of animations or gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark test suite. Wild Life (1440p) and Wild Life Extreme (4K) use the Vulkan graphics API to measure GPU speeds. Steel Nomad's regular and Light subtests focus on APIs more commonly used for game development, like Metal and DirectX 12, to assess gaming geometry and particle effects.

While the new platform has its upsides, superior graphics performance is not expected to be among them. Indeed, these results show what you’d expect from modern integrated graphics, with the discrete GPU systems taking the lead. To Intel’s credit, the gap between Nvidia’s entry-level RTX 4050 GPU in the Acer Swift X 14 and the Dell XPS 14 isn’t as wide as expected, but the Zenbook and other integrated graphics laptops still have their limits. You can squeak by for casual gaming and light 3D workloads, but if you need to run anything more demanding—especially professionally—our advice is to find a system with a discrete GPU.

Battery Rundown Test

We test each laptop and tablet's battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness set at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.

The efficiency of the Lunar Lake platform is meant to extend its battery life, and Intel seems to have succeeded on that front. The Zenbook lasted longer on our rundown test than any in this group, reaching nearly 24 hours. Super-long battery life supports the appeal of an incredibly portable laptop like this, so look forward to more long-lasting Lunar Lake systems.

The Windows AI Wars Are Upon Us

We’ll gauge plenty more Core Ultra 2-based laptops to come shortly now that Lunar Lake has hit the market, but this first look has given us an idea of what’s to come. The overall productivity performance didn’t see much of an uptick in our testing—so don't expect notably faster overall performance from these chips—while AI workloads potentially have a much higher ceiling. AMD's own Strix Point processors will fight for market share in this field, and unlike in the past, Qualcomm Snapdragon CPUs are also a relevant competitor, already in some big-name systems. Be sure to read our upcoming Lunar Lake laptop reviews as the performance averages settle and our AI testing develops alongside these machines.