Intel’s Core Ultra 200V series has finally matched Snapdragon for battery life – I’ve seen the demos and it’s looking good

Intel is worried. It’s worried about Qualcomm and it’s worried about Apple. It’s less worried about AMD but that’s a story for another day. When Snapdragon laptops first emerged earlier this year, they heralded the first time since Apple Silicon first emerged that Windows laptops had caught up on battery life.

Intel is so worried, in fact, that it has finally pulled its finger out, four years after Apple first dropped the ARM bombshell, and produced an x86 chip that can challenge the likes of Apple and Qualcomm on efficiency and, therefore, battery life.

I’ve just sat through a barrage of briefings about Intel’s global launch of its latest laptop chips – the Intel Core Ultra 200V series – and, if the claims are correct, the next thin and light laptop I recommend for battery life might not be a Snapdragon machine. Whisper it, but it might actually be based on an Intel CPU.

I was shown a demo at the launch that showed two laptops playing back a YouTube video on two near identical Dell XPS 13 laptops, one based on the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V chip, the other on the Meteor Lake Core Ultra 7 155H CPU. With USB power meters connected to each showed the former was consuming around roughly half as much overall system power. Indeed, Intel is claiming a total reduction of 50% in “total package power” over the first generation of Core Ultra chips and this seems to be reflected in testing.

More specifically, Intel is claiming an increase of 1.2x performance per Watt versus the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite X1E-80-100 chip and an impressive 2.29x performance per Watt versus the previous generation Intel Core Ultra 7 165H CPU. This suggests massive improvements in overall battery life compared to “old” Core Ultra-powered laptops.

Intel Core Ultra V200 series CPU preview: “Up to 30-hour battery life”

Those claims are not only Intel blowing hot air, though. They’re also being backed up by laptop manufacturers. At the launch, I spoke to a number of manufacturers who said their new Intel machines will last just as long, if not longer, than comparable Snapdragon laptops when it comes to battery life. Dell, for instance, is claiming its new Dell XPS 13 based on the Core Ultra 7-256V (with a Full HD+ IPS display) could last up to 30 hours from a single charge for local video playback, or 26 hours of streaming video. Its Snapdragon equivalent is quoted at 27 hours for video streaming.

Other manufacturers are being almost as optimistic, with Acer claiming its Core Ultra V200 series-powered Swift AI is capable of up to 29 hours of battery life, Asus saying its new ZenBook S 14 can manage up to 27 hours and Samsung claiming its 16in Galaxy Book5 Pro 360 lasts for up to 25 hours of video playback.

It isn’t all positive news, though, and if you look very closely at the specifications, you’ll see some fairly alarming variations, depending on the exact configuration. The Dell XPS models with the new tandem OLED display, for instance, are being quoted at a mere 16 hours of battery life for local video playback, a little over half of what the Full HD+ model is capable of achieving. Maybe Intel still has some work to do here.

And it certainly has some work to do on its overall line up, which remains as broad-ranging and confusing as ever. In total, there are no fewer than nine different models of the new CPUs available to laptop manufacturers, across the Core Ultra 5, 7 and 9 families of chips.

Some have slightly lower-power NPUs at 40 peak TOPS, others have slightly different clock frequencies and numbers of GPU cores. The one thing that unites them all is that they all have 8-core CPUs, but that won’t help consumers much when it comes to figuring out which model of laptop to buy. Both Apple and Qualcomm make this choice a whole lot easier with far fewer variations.

Intel Core Ultra V200 series preview: More powerful graphics, major architectural changes

Of course, it wouldn’t be an Intel chip launch without a tranche of performance claims surrounding CPU and GPU performance and — unsurprisingly — Intel is claiming superiority here, too. As I’ve said, all have the same tile-based architecture of the previous generation Core Ultras but with only eight cores split between performance and efficiency cores – four of each, with the Skymont efficiency cores moved onto their very own tile in the SoC.

The biggest step forward, however is for the system’s NPU (neural processing unit), whose performance rises from a paltry 11.5 peak TOPS (trillions of operations per second) to a much more impressive 48 peak TOPS. That’s a touch faster than Qualcomm’s 45 TOPS but more importantly, perhaps, is that it enables laptops built around the chip to claim Microsoft’s CoPilot+ accreditation. It’s worth noting that not all of the new Core Ultra 200V chips have the same level of NPU, with the Core Ultra 7 258V and 257V dropping to 47 peak TOPS, while all the Core Ultra 5 chips have 40 TOPS NPUs.

Intel says the new chip’s GPU is faster as well. It showed off multiple games benchmarks, most running at 1080p and medium settings, with higher than 60fps frame rates. That’s across titles such as Rise of the Tomb Raider and Cyberpunk 2077, not just less demanding titles. Note, too, though, that there are two different types of GPU available to manufacturers. The more powerful Core Ultra 7 and 9 CPUs get the 8-core 140V GPU, while the less powerful Core Ultra 5 CPUs get the less capable seven-core 130V GPU.

In addition, there’s a boost in performance per thread for the CPU over previous generations (and the competition) of up to 3x. This is a bit of a sleight of hand, however, since Intel has at the same time removed the long standing Hyper Threading capabilities of its chips and reduced the number of overall cores to eight. Most of the new chips are a little more powerful overall, then, but not by as much as the numbers might suggest.

There’s also a big change when it comes to system memory, or RAM. With the new Core Ultra 200V Series of chips, system memory will be what’s called “on package” or, in other words, directly inside the CPU package. The equivalent of integrated graphics, but for memory. That has a benefit for power efficiency and performance, which is a good thing, obviously, but unfortunately it also means you won’t be able to add more memory to systems with the new chips inside.

Intel Core Ultra V200 series preview: Early verdict

Intel has clearly been hard at work here, and it’s great news that we’ll finally have parity between Intel, Apple and Snapdragon when it comes to battery life. That’s assuming Intel’s rivals don’t immediately reply with even more efficient chips of their own.

The big question is how all these benchmark numbers translate to real world performance. Will that great battery life only be available in select few models, as suggested by Dell’s quoted battery life figures, or will the experience be generally great across all laptops with the new Core Ultra 200V chips inside? And while it’s fairly clear that the new laptops will be able to play games better, will they be able to do so without getting uncomfortably hot or noisy? Only time will tell.

I, for one, can’t wait to put all these new machines to the test. Hopefully, everything Intel has promised will come to pass and we’ll soon have Intel laptops that can rival the best of Apple and Snapdragon on battery life. Bring it on.