Intel Lunar Lake chips set to provide better performance at lower power on handheld gaming devices

Since AMD took the lead in the CPU market with the Ryzen series, Intel has been pushed out of the limelight. Not anymore as the company recently made a comeback with their Lunar Lake processors that are aimed at mobile processing units for thin and handheld devices. The initial impressions have been great, with better performance and less power consumption.

A recent performance comparison for the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V in Yoga Air 15 laptop, against two popular handheld consoles, Steam Deck and ROG Ally, gave some impressive results. A comparison video on Bilibili by Geekerwan showed Cyberpunk 2077 reaching 30fps.

Compared to that, the Steam Deck using AMD Van Gogh reached 22 fps and ROG Ally using Z1 Extreme reached 13 fps. One thing to note over here is that Core Ultra 7 258V was running at 12W while the other two were running at 9W.

While it may not compare to other powerhouses, considering the next-gen handheld consoles may improve on the battery more, users may see impressive gains with only a fraction of power usage increase as listed by wccftech.

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Powerful performance at less than half power 

Moving onto an increased TDP, the Lunar Lake CPU saw much better performance compared to its competitors on 30W power limit, beating Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 in every benchmark with minimal power increase. Furthermore, the Ultra 7 258V chip is limited to 30W, despite that, the chip matches its competitor on almost all fronts at less than half power consumption.

At this point, the Lunar Lake chip is looking like an incredible choice for handheld consoles, especially how popular these things are getting lately. These things are portable and provide an incredible gaming experience on the go. New iterations may see a line-up for these with Lunar Lake chipsets unless AMD comes up with something to compete.