Intel Lunar Lake CPU Significantly Outperforms Current-Gen Gaming Handhelds, Strong IPC Gains & Great Power Figures

Intel's Lunar Lake CPU has been tested by Geekerwan, revealing superb 15W gaming performance against current-gen handhelds.

Intel Lunar Lake Could End Up Being A Surprise Hit In The Handheld Gaming Segment, Great Performance at Low Power & Strong CPU IPC Gains

Last month, Intel launched its Lunar Lake "Core Ultra 200V" CPUs which are aimed at thin & light platforms. Instantly, the CPU became a hit with many testers praising its GPU performance & battery timings. The CPU also saw a major gain in performance despite featuring just 8 cores and 8 threads. Now, hardware veteran Geekerwan has posted his numbers showcasing how the chip performs in different scenarios.

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Starting first with the 15W tests, the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V was tested against the Steam Deck and ASUS ROG Ally (Z1 Extreme) in a 15W constrained TDP mode at 720P to showcase what gamers can expect from Lunar Lake in a handheld design. The Lunar Lake chip has 12W power due to its SoC and DRAM being on the same package while the competition is around 9W with the motherboard sipping the extra power but confined to the same 15W limit.

In terms of performance, the Intel Lunar Lake CPU provides great performance at low power, which is up to 67% faster than the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 at the same 15W limit. The 1% Low FPS is higher than the average frame rate of the RDNA 3.5 and Alchemist Xe-LPG iGPUs and far exceeds the current handhelds in Black Myth Wukong.

In Cyberpunk 2077, the Lunar Lake SOC delivers over 2x the GPU performance versus the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 and almost 3x versus the Z1 Extreme featured on the ROG Ally with FSR enabled. This is truly a groundbreaking performance that should make Lunar Lake-powered handhelds an awesome platform for gamers who were kind of disappointed with the Meteor Lake designs.

Geekerwan also tested each chip at an unconstrained full power mode. The Lunar Lake CPUs can