HP Spectre X360 laptop with Intel Core Ultra 200V “Lunar Lake” shows up in first benchmarks

One of the first tests of Xe2 graphics: even faster graphics at less power.

HP is set to introduce a refresh of its laptop featuring a foldable screen, dubbed the X360 Spectre. This upcoming 2-in-1 system has made an appearance on the SiSoftware website under the name “14-fh0xxx – 5CD4038WJV (HP 8CDE),” suggesting it might serve as an early validation model. In terms of specifications, it appears to be one of the first Intel Core Ultra 200V systems.

Beneath this designation, Intel is rolling out the new Lunar Lake architecture, which integrates Lion Cove P-Cores and Skymont E-Cores within a fresh low-power SoC design. These CPU cores will also premiere under Arrow Lake, part of the Core 200 series. However, Lunar Lake SoCs are tailored for low-power mobile systems, also enabling fanless designs if restricted in terms of power.

The primary difference between Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake, beyond their performance objectives and market segments, lies in their graphics architectures. While Arrow Lake will maintain the Xe-LPG (Alchemist) series as seen in Meteor Lake, Lunar Lake SoCs will leverage the Xe2-LPG, a low-power iteration of the Battlemage architecture. In fact, it’s one of the earliest products known to adopt this architecture.

Intel Lunar Lake with Xe2 graphics outperforms Meteor Lake counterparts, Source: SiSoftware

On SiSoftware, the Lunar Lake GPU underwent testing in the GP (GPU) Processing benchmark, showcasing a score of 2108 Mpix/s, surpassing Meteor Lake chips. In this case, the Xe2-LPG GPU isn’t even the full variant with 8 Xe-Cores but rather a cut-down version with 7 cores. Reportedly, it operates with a TDP of 17W and a clock speed of 1.85 GHz. Yet, it achieves higher speed despite having fewer cores, consuming less power, and running at a lower clock.

Taking this into consideration, the Lunar Lake GPU could be an attractive architecture for next-gen gaming handhelds. The MSI Claw featuring the Core Ultra 100H series simply isn’t capable of competing with AMD APUs across all games. Judging from these early benchmarks, Intel’s expected 2x performance improvement with the Xe2 architecture could indeed happen. This also means the next-gen discrete GPU series (the Bxxx) will definitely not go unnoticed either, hopefully with enough performance to compete with what comes next from NVIDIA and AMD.

Source: SiSoftware via miktdt