Intel Just Started Launching Lunar Lake

Sorry, “Core Ultra 200V” as Intel is calling it. Anyway, these chips are seemingly Intel’s “thin and light” chips and not for their larger, more powerful applications, as evidenced by the fact that you’re limited to 8 cores and 32GB of RAM. There are people out there who really think that Intel’s got something here, and it would seem that they’re decently right. It’s refreshing to see at least something interesting from Intel since Apple broke up with them and started releasing the Apple Silicon chips, but I think Intel is simultaneously shooting themselves in the foot with this release.

I’m Confused

Okay so if these chips aren’t for super powerful laptops, why are we releasing a “Core Ultra 9” variant chip for this line? I don’t really understand what Intel’s going for here. “Core Ultra 9” is supposed to be the top end of chips and this thing is basically just matching the M3 chip—which is nearing a year old at this point—so why is one being put into a thin and light class laptop?

AI Bubble Chips

That’s what I think I’m going to call these. To me, it feels like Intel phoned it in on the CPU and GPU to really push the NPU to be way more than what it needs to be at this point. The main differentiator between all of these chips is the NPU and companies really have yet to actually talk about what the NPU is good for. Without that, the only differentiator between the Ultra 9 288V and the Ultra 5 226V—the highest and lowest–end chips in the lineup—is that they just pumped more power into the thing, added another GPU core, and you get a bit more RAM. The fact that there’s 7 chips between these two is insane.

Branding Nightmare

With an 8 core CPU in an “Ultra 9” chip, we’re just gonna be confusing people. Like, compared to the likes of Apple and Qualcomm, Intel is erroneously giving this chip its top-of-the-line brand name and it just doesn’t make sense. If an M3-equivalent chip is an Ultra 9 and an M3 Max–equivalent chip is also an Ultra 9, then what does Ultra 9 even mean?

It feels like Intel is making their branding unnecessarily confusing so that they can make it sound better than the competition when it’s just matching last year’s chips.

Conclusion

Overall this is really just a mess from Intel. I think it’s great that the chips are doing well and they’re definitely going to do better at gaming than any ARM chip simply due to their legacy architecture, but Intel really just bombed the delivery here. This lineup of chips should probably be like 3 different chips tops [insert TOPS joke here]. It feels like Intel is trying to figure out a niche where they’re still only competing against themselves as opposed to actually pitting themselves against the competition. Right now it feels like the only real advantages to the chips in the market are derived from their ISA, not anything Intel actually did to improve the chips. It’s “the most efficient x86 chip” but it still loses out to ARM chips, it’s better in gaming solely because of compatibility, AMD is not their only competition anymore.

Am I being too harsh? Do you see what I’m getting at? Let me know in the comments or mention me on Mastodon.