Maybe it will work the second time, but the drivers are still not without problems.
Intel, which is currently in dire straits and is even interested in being bought by rival Qualcomm, released Meteor Lake processors late last year. This was a big breakthrough for Intel, which should also mean a restart of numbering, since it was the first time it used chiplet technology, which AMD has been using since 2018.
Meteor Lake, like the Core Ultra 100 series, was intended only for laptops, but it was also considered for gaming laptops, namely MSI’s Claw device. There, however, it turned out that the processor efficiency is not that amazing, and the graphics chip on the Xe1 (Alchemist) architecture is not bad at all, but this was accompanied by significant problems with the drivers in terms of compatibility with old games and overall stability.
We’ve known for some time that the less-than-successful Claw would be followed by the rather fancy-named Claw 8 AI+, which would use Lunar Lake processors. They’re labeled Core Ultra 200V, and Intel released them for laptops at the end of September. They are designed for very low-power devices and have only 4 P-cores (Lion Cove architecture) and 4 E-cores (Skymont architecture). The graphics part is built on the Xe2 (Battlemage) architecture, and the entire chip already contains LPDDR memory from the factory.
So these are processors that on paper seem to be ideal candidates for gaming handhelds, and this is also confirmed by the current tests carried out by the Chinese channel Geekerwan, as reported by Wccftech magazine. The Core Ultra 7 258V processor was tested against the previous generation in the form of the Core Ultra 9 185H, the competing AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 (Zen 5) and the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite.
While with the consumption limit unlocked the situation in the tested games was relatively balanced, or the AMD chip won, with consumption limited to 15W the picture was completely different. Here the Z1 Extreme processor (Zen 4), which is used in most handhelds, and the Steam Deck chip (Zen 2) were added to the test. However, no amount of competition for Lunar Lake was enough.
In Black Myth: Wukong Ultra 7, the 258V averaged 30fps, more than double that of the Z1 Extreme, which struggled mightily with such limited power. The HX 370 performed best with 18fps, while the Steam Deck topped the rest with 22fps.
geekerwan_2.png | Source: Gikervan
In Cyberpunk 2077, Lunar Lake completely destroyed all competitors. All other processors achieved a maximum of 13fps and a near-zero minimum, with the Ultra 7 258V holding an average of 28fps with a minimum of 17fps.
So, the results are fantastic, but of course, not everything has to be so rosy. Only two games with limited consumption were tested, the situation may be different in other games. Although drivers have changed a lot in the two years since Alchemist was released, they still have problems with some games, not only older ones but also some modern games.
Only time will tell if Lunar Lake can prove itself in the real world and truly compete with AMD chips in the handheld space. The already mentioned Claw 8 AI+, the only currently confirmed laptop with Lunar Lake, should hit the market late next year.
Source :Indian TV
