Intel formally announced their Core Ultra 200V series "Lunar Lake" laptop processors today in Berlin.

Intel Core Ultra 200 Series Lunar Lake is a big upgrade over Meteor Lake with significant CPU core improvements, Xe2 integrated graphics, and a faster NPU for AI acceleration. Many elements of Lunar Lake have been previously disclosed by Intel while today they showed their vendor benchmark numbers with claims of how Lunar Lake can outperform the AMD Ryzen AI 300 series competition as well as the Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 SoCs.

Unfortunately I was not briefed in advance on Lunar Lake ahead of today's event -- and usually when snubbed by a hardware vendor is often an early indicator of the Linux support being less than desirable. Thus the very brief article. In any event the Phoronix focus is on the Linux support/performance and all of the Intel disclosures today around Lunar Lake performance are with Microsoft Windows 11. As far as the Linux support for Lunar Lake, for the most part I am expecting it to be all squared away -- but the big exception is on the Lunar Lake Xe2 graphics still stabilizing.

Only with Linux 6.12 coming up will [1]Lunar Lake graphics being enabled by default (along with Battlemage). The Linux 6.12 merge window will open in mid-September while the stable kernel won't be out until November. Thus any early Intel Lunar Lake laptop customers will need to either roll their dice trying the "force_probe" override on Linux 6.11 or be running a Linux 6.12 Git snapshot. You'll also want to be running the very latest Mesa Git code for the newest Intel OpenGL and Vulkan driver support.

At least from the CPU side and even the NPU all of the key Lunar Lake enablement should be in place on recent kernels. In any event once getting my hands on Lunar Lake hardware is where I'll be able to focus on the Phoronix value around the Linux support and performance so stay tuned.

Frustrating some Linux/open-source fans is that Lunar Lake embeds Microsoft Pluton.

Lunar Lake laptop pre-orders should begin today ahead of expected availability beginning September 24. I'll be pre-ordering an Intel Lunar Lake laptop as soon as I find the most interesting candidate for benchmarking. Thus stay tuned for the Linux performance benchmarks of the Intel Core Ultra 200V series later this month along with exploring more around the Xe2 graphics driver quality/support and other performance tests.

Below are some of the key takeaways from the Core Ultra 200V Series launch today.

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[10] Unfortunate not being briefed in advance for this launch to prepare a better overview. In any event stay tuned for later this month for learning more about the Intel Lunar Lake Linux support and performance once getting my hands on hardware.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.12-Intel-Xe2-Stable

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=2024&image=lunarlake_linux_1_lrg

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=2024&image=lunarlake_linux_2_lrg

[4] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=2024&image=lunarlake_linux_3_lrg

[5] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=2024&image=lunarlake_linux_4_lrg

[6] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=2024&image=lunarlake_linux_5_lrg

[7] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=2024&image=lunarlake_linux_6_lrg

[8] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=2024&image=lunarlake_linux_7_lrg

[9] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=2024&image=lunarlake_linux_8_lrg

[10] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=2024&image=lunarlake_linux_9_lrg