It feels like Intel has been talking about Lunar Lake almost from the day it announced Core Ultra, which was codenamed Meteor Lake. It's finally here, in the form of Intel Core Ultra Series 2.

Here's the deal though: Intel is making some big promises with Core Ultra Series 2. It talked a lot about this back at Computex, promising to bust the myth that x86 can't be as efficient as Arm. But Intel Tech Tour at Computex was all about the architecture. Now, the company is taking the wraps off completely, showing real performance claims (and SKUs).

Beating Arm at its own game

Skymont E-cores aim to dethrone Arm as the efficiency king

For a very long time, Intel's product releases generally demonstrated a modest improvement in performance and/or efficiency over their predecessors. But now, the company has real competition from Qualcomm, and even Apple, despite the latter being the more isolated Mac market.

Intel took aim squarely at Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite chipset, specifically making claims against the X1E-78-100 and X1E-80-100 models. Firstly, it's promising 20% better performance-per-watt than the X1E-80-100, a bold claim. Remember, performance-per-watt is supposed to be Arm's thing.

The firm showed off claims for everything from gaming performance with its new Arc graphics to Stable Diffusion, winning in every category. For AI, the NPU gets 48 TOPS, unless you're getting a Core Ultra 5, which we now know is 40 TOPS. Intel also talked about the package AI performance, which is 120 TOPS including the CPU, GPU, and NPU.

Qualcomm's Snapdragon X series uses a 45 TOPS NPU across the board. I asked about total package TOPS, and was surprised to learn that it doesn't disclose that anymore. Up until very recently, it used to use the CPU, GPU, and NPU as the Qualcomm AI Engine.

Intel says it has the fastest cores, which is probably true, but what's interesting is that it's also promising to win in multithreaded performance...with eight cores. Core Ultra Series 2 has four P-cores and four E-cores, none of which use Hyperthreading, and it's promising to beat Apple M3, Snapdragon X Elite, and Meteor Lake.

Focusing on the best experience

Intel was happy to point out Qualcomm's shortcomings

If I had a nickel for every time someone at Intel said the words "did not run" during this presentation, I'd definitely have several nickels. While talking up gaming, the company cleverly pointed out that around half of the games it tried to test simply didn't work on the Snapdragon X Elite. After it was done talking about gaming, this became a theme with many of its claims.

Intel isn't wrong. I've stated this in every Snapdragon review I've done. You simply can't buy it if you play games on your PC, even casually, because there's no way to tell if the thing you want to play is going to work, let alone work well.

Snapdragon X Elite devices are not gaming laptops; we all know that. But people do play games on their PCs, and Intel knows that.

While Intel has been under threat from Qualcomm for a while now, its strategy seems to have been to remind everyone that everything works on an x86 chip while developing the technology to compete. It's still reminding us that the PC ecosystem is built around x86, but now Lunar Lake is the technology it's been working on.

Right out of the gate, Intel said that the thing that matters is a great PC experience, a message that's lost on many companies, not only including silicon vendors like AMD but also OEMs like HP. Lots of companies are talking up AI performance, but Intel seems to understand that consumers aren't buying PCs just for that, or at least that's what its messaging implies.

Core Ultra Series 2 SKUs

The all-new V-series

Back in Taipei, Intel told us pretty much everything about Lunar Lake, except for the SKUs, so here they are.

You'll notice that there are quite a few SKUs, all of them eight-core. But remember, Intel is doing on-board memory now, so each one has a variant with 16GB and one with 32GB.

This is also where we learned that the Core Ultra 5 has a 40 TOPS NPU. Previous messaging was just that Lunar Lake is "up to 48 TOPS".

There's an all-new 'V' suffix, which doesn't stand for anything. It's just a way to differentiate from the rest of its products, so a salesman can easily say that this thing is what it is. Intel confirmed that there will be a U-series and an H-series, and they'll still be called Core Ultra; they won't be Lunar Lake though.

This is the third time in as many generations that the company has changed the suffix of "the thing to buy". Two years ago, it was the U-series; one year ago, it was P-series; today, it's H-series; tomorrow, it's V-series.

As usual, Intel didn't go into detail about what those other chips would be, but it's safe to say that they won't be the ones that compete with Arm for performance-per-watt, and they presumably don't have the all-new Arc graphics.

Core Ultra Series 2 is available to purchase now

Alongside this, Dell announced a refreshed XPS 13 and HP announced its all-new OmniBook Ultra Flip, which you can preorder now. They ship on September 24.

Every OEM is going to be announcing products with Core Ultra Series 2 though. Expect to hear more about those this week.