STACK #241 November 2024

INTEL INSIDER

TECH FEATURE

visit jbhifi.com.au/stack

OUR METEOR LAKE LAPTOP PICKS MSI Prestige 16 AI EVO

HP Spectre x360 14-eu0031TU EVO 2-in-1

Lenovo Yoga Pro 9i EVO If you’re a creator, the Yoga Pro 9i is an excellent collaborator. For starters, you’re looking at an even more powerful brain – the Intel Core Ultra 9 185H, with six performance cores that can each hit blistering speeds of up to 5.1GHz. That’s backed up by eight E-cores that can reach 3.8GHz each, and a Nvidia GeForce RTX 4050 graphics card for far greater imagery. Your creations will look their best on the 16-inch 3.2K display, and you’ve got the gift of choice for accessories, with a range of ports including HDMI, USB 3.2, USB-C, Thunderbolt 4.0, and an SD card reader.

Straight off the bat, this powerhouse from MSI is a perfect showcase for Intel’s Meteor Lake processor. The Prestige 16 is packing an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H processor with six P-cores, eight E-cores and two low-power E-cores. The P-cores can be cranked up to 4.8GHz in Max Turbo mode, and coupled with the beefy 32GB of RAM, this system will make short work of even the most demanding of tasks. No wonder it’s sporting the EVO badge! The rest of the laptop is impressive too, of course. There’s a generous 2TB of storage space, a gorgeous higher-than-4K OLED display, Intel Arc graphics, and compatibility with a speedy Wi-Fi 7 connection.

If you need something more versatile but no less powerful, the HP Spectre x360 is just

the ticket. This powerful lappy is running the Intel Core Ultra 7 processor, and also sports the EVO badge. It’s also a 2-in-1, meaning you can use it like a traditional laptop or fold it over into a tablet. To enable that, the 14-inch display is touchscreen enabled, with a silky smooth 120Hz refresh rate. You’ll get up to eight hours of battery life from a full charge, so you can work or play anywhere, in whichever format you like. SoC: Intel Core Ultra 7 155H, 16 cores up to 4.8GHz RAM: 16GB Display: 14” 2.8K OLED 120Hz touchscreen Storage: 512GB SSD

SoC: Intel Core Ultra 9 185H, 16 cores up to 5.1GHz RAM: 32GB Display: 16” 3.2K IPS Storage: 1TB SSD

SoC: Intel Core Ultra 7 155H, 16 cores up to 4.8GHz RAM: 32GB Display: 16” UHD+ OLED Storage: 2TB SSD

Lunar Lake has landed!

Intel’s latest processors are here! The 200V series is codenamed Lunar Lake, and again they come in Core Ultra 5, Core Ultra 7 and Core Ultra 9 varieties. But these chips mark quite a drastic improvement over the Meteor Lake (or 100H) series.

bit more grunt! All eight cores can also be boosted with Max Turbo mode to really burn through intensive tasks. Another major upgrade is that the RAM, which stores working data short-term to boost multitasking, is now built right into the SoC as well. That makes the whole thing more efficient by reducing the need to send data back and forth across the system. Improvements have also been made to the GPU and NPU. All up, these new processors can perform well over 100 trillion operations per second (TOPS)!

At a glance, it might sound like Intel has gone backwards – there are now only eight cores, half the number on last generation’s chips. But Lunar Lake manages to outperform last year’s devices while consuming far less energy. What’s new? There are only four performance cores (P-cores) and four low-power efficiency cores (E-cores) this time. The new chip design, however, gives those E-cores more than three times the base performance of

the last gen E-cores. In fact, the Lunar Lake E-cores even have significantly better base performance than Meteor Lake’s P-cores! As a result, the Lunar Lake chips can use low-power E-cores to perform most of the everyday tasks that last year’s models would have handballed to the P-cores. That means the processors use far less electricity. Of course, those P-cores

are still there waiting in the wings, ready to fire up when you need a

58 NOVEMBER 2024

jbhifi.com.au