Intel says Core Ultra 9 288V leads AMD's HX 370 in games by 16%, Meteor Lake by 31% and the less said about Qualcomm the better

Intel has finally unveiled details of its brand new Lunar Lake mobile processors. While these chips are primarily focused on low power operation, mostly intended for your next office laptop, there is good news for gamers. Intel is talking a big game for the new Xe2 iGPU found inside these chips.

Lunar Lake is the first product out of Intel built using its latest GPU architecture, Xe2. Its top configuration for Lunar Lake, called the Arc 140V GPU, will come with eight Xe-cores. That's the same number as the top Meteor Lake GPU, though Intel has already promised other upgrades to improve performance and consistency.

There's also a smaller option, with seven Xe-cores, called the Arc 130V GPU.

One Xe-core likely won't make a huge difference to performance. According to Damien Triolet, director of GPU technical marketing, it shouldn't matter much at all.

«My expectation is that the difference is not necessarily going to be huge, where you will see more deltas is really from design to design,» Triolet tells me.

Though we'll see how that shakes out in testing. Either way, if you're looking for top gaming performance without a discrete GPU in a laptop, you'll want to look for the 140V in the upper echelons of the line-up.

Similarly, Lunar Lake shares on-package memory between CPU and GPU. There are two memory configurations available, 16 GB or 32 GB of LPDDR5X-8533, and the larger option will no doubt be the best chance at high performance.

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Before we get into Intel's benchmarks, here are the Core Ultra 200V Series specifications in full:

Over at the Lunar Lake launch event in Berlin, Intel's Robert Hallock said of the new chips: «I'm not going to call it a gaming CPU, but, damn, it can play a game.»

Talking a big game, then. 

Intel does provide some benchmarks for our consideration ahead of the Core Ultra 200V's release later this month. All of which are carried out at 1080p.