How good will battery life be with Intel Lunar Lake CPUs? Lenovo’s testing shows a Yoga laptop blowing away Apple’s MacBook M3

Apple and Qualcomm should be very worried, by the look of things

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Intel’s Lunar Lake processorsare really going to deliver on the battery life front, according to some new info fromLenovo.

Tom’s Hardwareflagged up that Lenovo has apparently broken an NDA and published battery life figures for one of its new Yoga laptops with a Core Ultra 200V (Lunar Lake) CPU, and they are nothing short of astonishing.

If the claims are right – and take any internal benchmarking with a little seasoning, as ever – the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition is capable of almost 24 hours of video playback (with a 1080p H.264 video clip running at 24 FPS).

The laptop packs one ofIntel’s Core Ultra 7 258V processors, showing off the efficiency of this second-tier Lunar Lake model.

Interestingly, Lenovo also provided comparative battery longevity results forAppleMacBook laptops with M2 and M3 silicon, and the Yoga Slim 7i outperformed both by over five hours (the M3 MacBook lasted 18 hours and 32 minutes, and the M2 laptop 18 hours and 19 minutes).

Brightness was uniform, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off (and sound muted) in this testing, we’re told. Check out Lenovo’s demo yourself in theYouTubeclip below (which is still live at the time of writing – it may not stay that way, though).

Analysis: Lunar eclipse of Apple and Qualcomm?

Intel has said it has concentrated in a big way on efficiency with Lunar Lake, and this would appear to very muchback up that idea. The comparison to MacBooks shows that Lunar Lake, a traditional x86 processor, can outdo Apple’sArm-based chips, and quite comfortably too – and Arm silicon is famously strong for laptop battery life.

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Tom’s also reminds us that this battery testing isn’t even the beefiest longevity we’ve seen a laptop maker boast about for an incoming Lunar Lake notebook. There are claims of more like 26 hours in other cases, and Asus has boasted about a battery life of up to 29 hours at the most eye-opening end of the estimates here.

Do we have a new champion CPU for the engine of thebest thin-and-light laptopsin Lunar Lake? It’s looking that way, and Apple – as well as Qualcomm, with its Arm-based Snapdragon X SoCs forWindows 11laptops – should be rightly worried by the look of things.

The other question is how much performance has been traded off for better power efficiency with Intel’s new mobile CPUs, but fromwhat we’ve seen recently at the IFA show, the compromise looks more than palatable in this respect. Don’t forget that Lunar Lake has some pretty cool hidden tricks, too,one of which will delight gamers and creatives, and the chips offer enough grunt on the AI front to qualify for Copilot+ PCs.

Ultimately, we’ll need to test Lunar Lake machines ourselves to uncover the full picture, and how performance and battery longevity are really balanced – but it won’t be long before that happens. The first laptops packing Lunar Lake CPUsgo on sale next week, on September 24, although it’ll likely be a modest trickle of releases to begin with, if past history is anything to go by.

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Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - ‘I Know What You Did Last Supper’ - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).

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