AMD Ryzen AI 300 and Snapdragon X processors from Qualcomm arrived in notebooks a few weeks ago. Their direct competition is now also presented by Intel in the tested Asus Zenbook S14 laptop. The Lunar Lake processor series is groundbreaking in many ways, it is made up of chiplets from TSMC and a very powerful GPU.
Before we look at the Asus Zenbook S14 laptop itself, we have to say something about the most important innovation – the brand new processor from Intel. First of all, it must be said that Lunar Lake is only an LP (Low Power) mobile processor. Only a more advanced version of Arrow Lake will reach the desktop. The entire Intel Core Ultra 200V series is intended for Ai Copilot notebooks, as a response and competitor to the Snapdragon X and AMD Ai HX 300. It is not a successor to Meteor Lake, but its addition to stylish laptops. The top Meteor Lake models are significantly more powerful. Let’s take a quick look at what’s important about Lunar Lake.
Intel Lunar Lake
The chip build and architecture is an evolution of Meteor Lake (we covered this article). It is a chiplet design, Meteor Lake consists of four tiles (chiplets) and Lunar Lake is built on three tiles that integrate everything. It’s basically just two tiles, as the third one is just empty silicon to complement the surface integrity and so that the rest doesn’t deform in any way. Both chiplets are made by TSMC, the processor part on the N3B process and the I/O chiplet on the cheaper N6 process.
The first essential thing is again the two types of kernels. But against Meteor Lake, we completely lack E-Cores. The Lunar Lake processor carries 4 cores P-Cores and 4 cores economical, LP-Cores. But LP-Cores are a different architecture than in Meteor Lake and have twice the performance. Since the chip does not support HT, the number of cores is equal to the number of threads. So all Lunar Lake processors have 8 cores and 8 threads. The maximum frequency of P-Cores can reach up to 5.1 GHz. Economical clock cores do not work much, their clock is essentially a constant 3.7 GHz.
An important moment is memory. Memory is a fixed part of the processor, it cannot be expanded in any way. Basic models carry 16 GB of LP-DDR5-8533 MHz memory. Higher models have a capacity of 32 GB. An interesting fact is that the memories and the controller fully support the dynamic memory clock. Under lower load, the memory can reduce the clock rate to DDR5-2400 MHz, in case of high performance requirements, increase it to DDR5-9200 MHz. This is a very interesting element of architecture and energy efficiency.
The iGPU or Intel Arc Xe2 is a separate chapter. Intel has devoted a lot of space to graphics performance, literally, when it comes to the silicon on Lunar Lake. The performance probably won’t increase by 50 percent against Meteor Lake, but some major increase can be expected. Of course we will measure it.
Although there is a lot of emphasis on it, with Lunar Lake the AI performance in the NPU chip has been greatly increased, up to 120 TOPs in total. Usability is still limited at the moment, but we might see it someday. I personally think that this generation of NPU chips from all manufacturers (AMD and Qualcomm) will become obsolete before they find any application. Only time will tell.
ASUS Zenbook S14
This year’s new models of the Zenbook S series represent processor innovations from AMD and now Intel. My colleague Michal Rybka already tested the larger Zenbook S16 model with the AI HX 300 processor from AMD, today we will look at the smaller S14 with Intel Lunar Lake. This essentially ends the Asus offer in this premium and stylish class for this year. I wouldn’t expect more models.
The Zenbook model series has long been intended for content creators and creatives. It is an elegant design with extremely low weight and long battery life. Let’s leave artificial intelligence aside for now, because contrary to marketing claims, the usability of Ai Copilot with NPU is still very limited.
Asus has been trying to compete with Apple computers with this series for many years, but on the Windows platform, even the price of the computer tested today is not crazy at all. At the moment, it appears in stores with a price tag below 50,000 CZK. It’s not bad for an OLED 3K display, quiet operation and the overall equipment of the computer.
The model Zenbook S14 (UX5406) tested by us is only available in one configuration in the Czech Republic. You can only choose the color. The offer includes a white and gray model. The components are of course identical for both. I already mentioned the price a bit above, they are in Alza both versions for CZK 48,490 including tax.
Source: pctuning.cz
