Intel launched its Lunar Lake CPUs for laptops at the start of September, coming after several months of promises from Team Blue. Intel has faced several struggles over the last year, and Lunar Lake's job was to right those wrongs. While Intel has come through on most of its promises, there are some caveats to those.

3 Power efficiency

Though don't push it too hard

Lunar Lake's biggest promise was to "bust the myth" that Arm was more efficient than x86. Intel made some big architectural changes, and those have lent themselves to massive efficiency improvements. Lunar Lake includes four 'Lion Cove' P-cores and four 'Skymont' E-cores, with a focus on running as much as possible on those E-cores. Intel has increased the micro-op queue while also improving the out-of-order execution engine. Other changes, like improvements to buffering and queueing capabilities, will also mean that cores can run more efficiently. They're all small changes, but they add up.

Things fall apart a little bit when you try to push Lunar Lake, though. That lower power consumption comes at a middle-of-the-road performance that simply doesn't compare to Apple Silicon or even the Snapdragon X Elite. It works well, but power users won't be happy with what they get on the balanced performance mode. It's definitely an improvement over Meteor Lake no question, but the performance efficiency of Lunar Lake still isn't quite up to par with the best of what's available on Arm. You can push it with the "best performance" power profile in Windows, but that has been a major battery drainer in some Lunar Lake laptops.

What's still not clear is whether or not Intel truly did "bust the myth" that it claimed it could bust. Intel is definitely catching up, but there were some major architectural shifts in order to make it happen. The Dell XPS 13 that we reviewed is an excellent example of how Lunar Lake can definitely power a MacBook Air competitor, which in itself is still a fantastic achievement for x86. Did Intel "bust the myth"? Probably not, but it definitely made x86 competitive.

2 Better performance

But there are now limitations on memory

One of the other ways that Intel is improving performance and battery life is by soldering the memory to the processor itself. While that reduces latency and also reduces power consumption, it means that Intel is limiting the memory options for consumers. Right now, Lunar Lake is only made with 16GB of RAM and 32GB of RAM, meaning that there are no 64GB options for power users. Intel is clearly positioning Lunar Lake as a competitor to Arm laptops for "regular" consumers rather than power users, which is almost certainly the biggest market.

Because of that target market, the drawbacks of using performance mode on Lunar Lake aren't really as big of a deal in a broader scope. While it's still a knock against Lunar Lake, Intel is still within its rights to say that it delivered on its promise in a broader sense. Lunar Lake is definitely way more efficient out of the box when compared to Meteor Lake, while still also offering more performance, too. The more performance especially is inarguable, which intel absolutely deserves credit for.

1 A return to form

Sort of

Intel is on a long road to recovery, and it arguably starts with Lunar Lake. While Intel isn't turning any heads in the industry with a groundbreaking new product, Lunar Lake is still a step in the right direction for a company that's been continuously stepping on rakes the last few months. Every right move has been met by a poor one, with Intel's 14th Gen i9 series really highlighting the problems within Intel at present. Intel is righting its wrongs, and while that will take more than just a Lunar Lake launch succeeding, it's the start of the road to recovery.

For example, Intel's roadmap for its own fabrication nodes seems to be holding up well, though Arrow Lake's move from Intel 20A to TSMC raises some concerns. Intel claims it's because Intel 18A is doing so well that the company is focusing all resources on it instead, but the company's recent history really makes you wonder how true that statement is. After all, no company is immune to PR spin, and that's not even close to just being an Intel problem. Lunar Lake being produced on TSMC is also a big question mark, but Intel basically says to trust the process.

What's especially interesting though is that nobody a year ago would have talked about Intel making a chip that powers a laptop directly competing with the MacBook Air. Intel has been in dire straits, but taking a step back, that's an incredible achievement. Competition is good for consumers, and I'm absolutely rooting for Intel to continue on the path that it's been on.