We benchmarked a retail model Asus Zenbook S 14 with Intel's new and true AI-ready Lunar Lake platform and saw standard-setting battery results.

Lunar Lake is the codename given to the company's latest round of Intel Core Ultra 200V chips. And the company has a lot to prove since it's Qualcomm's new Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Plus laptop chips that are making strides to allow Windows CoPilot+ PCs to compete against Apple's M-series chips inside the best MacBooks.

Intel's upcoming Core Ultra 200 series 'Arrow Lake' CPU retail packaging leaked out: our first look at the packaging for the Core Ultra 9 285K CPU.

We tested Intel's latest Lunar Lake GPU in the Core Ultra 9 288V to see how it stacks up against both the previous generation Meteor Lake graphics as well as AMD's Ryzen AI graphics, Radeon 980M. There are promising signs but also lingering concerns about Intel's drivers and optimizations.

The Intel Core Ultra 200V processors support up to 32GB of LPDDR5X RAM, connectivity for up to three 4K monitors, and Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 (with LE Audio).

Thanks to Intel's new x86 Core Ultra 200V chip, the Asus ZenBook S 14 has the same battery life as Snapdragon notebooks and comes with everything for Copilot+.

The latest Dell XPS 13 9350 packs Intel's new fast and efficicent Lunar Lake-based Core Ultra 200V processors into a sleek, attractive chassis. - Page 3

Ultra-thin and light laptops like the Asus Zenbook S 14 live and die by their battery life. No one likes forever hunting for outlets, and that's particularly frustrating with computers designed to be highly mobile;

Intel first discussed the mobile architecture it calls Lunar Lake way back in June, and stated at the time it would arrive in Q3. The initial reveal included some lofty performance claims, so we've all been waiting to find out if those numbers were marketing BS or the real deal.

Lunar Lake is Intel’s Snapdragon killer. Intel’s Core Ultra Series 2 (Lunar Lake) was specifically designed to emphasize low power, but with competitive performance. In this it somewhat succeeds, though the Core Ultra 7 258V chip I tested can still run a distant second,