3-pound Lunarlake vs Arrowlake Laptops

[tp4tissue]

Some m0ar testn'  today.

On average. Arrowlake 255h vs Lunarlake 256V

In modern games, GPU bound.  Lunar lake is around 30-50%  more power efficient, fps/watt.   That's pretty enormous.

Example:

Doom 2016, 1920x1200 vulcan, near max settings
255h(140Tgpu), 62 fps 14w   
256v(140Vgpu), 78 fps 11.4w,  +54% fps/watt

Halo Infinite, lowest settings to saturate CPU frames
255h(140Tgpu), 104 fps 10.3w
256v(140Vgpu), 132 fps 8.2w,  +60% fps/watt

If you force the matter, in an older game, where it can take advantage of Arrowlake's giant 24mb cache, putting it into mid-bound scenarios, you can get it to run faster than Lunar lake.

The other issue is Power-Contention.

The 255h is 16core in a 40watt chassis
The 256v is 8core in a 40watt chassis

Because the Arrowlake 255h cpu cores are less efficient and so numerous, in many scenarios the power director can wobble and feel confused.

So, sometimes all power to the GPU,  sometimes direct xx% to CPU 1, here you get unstable RNG framerate.

On Lunarlake 256v, the power contention is more stable, because the GPU is so much more efficient, less fluctuation.

Not perfect, you can still trick it to do weird things, it is better though most of the time.


If you got some task that can Crank the CPU, the 255h hands down is way faster than 256v, but its efficiency becomes very bad during the crank.  It feels like in order to compete with AMD Zen 5, Intel pushed Arrowlake slightly outside of the hump.


Is 255h a good mobile option?  With absolutely no GPU requirements, which is often the case in people buying/using 14" laptops,  It's a sensible option.

If you HAVE gpu requirements SOMETIMES,  then 256v takes the lead.

[tp4tissue]

If you need a 3-pound laptop THIS YEAR.

Best chips.

Zen 375/370 with 890m igpu, matches/beats 140v intel.

Avoid Zen 360/350/340, these 860m/880m igpus are too damn slow, not competitive.

Intel 256v/258v  Lunarlake with 140v igpu

Intel 255h Arrowlake with 140t igpu,  Don't bother with higher model unless in a much bigger chassis like 16inch 50-60watt+,  255h already has enough trouble at 40watts as it is. Waste of money to go bigger.

[tp4tissue]

NEXT year. 

We may be looking at some Crazy gud' chips from AMD, with Zen 6 + RDNA 5, these are going to surpass anything Intel has in the tank for a LONG while.

Right now the 860m->890m are RDNA 3.5, so old gpu tech. That's why they're very mild.

RDNA 5 can probably do 1060-3gb performance in a 40watt chassis. Can it get to 1060-6gb, MAYBE, but it's a big maybe, Tp4 doubts it.


In 60watt chassis though, RDNA 5 will be EXTREMELY competitive.  So 16" laptops are going to be crazy good.  But 4-4.5lbs + power brick, 5-6lbs, mm..  You have to be a young person to carry that all day.

[tp4tissue]

Screenshot. Left is 255h, right is 256v.

Screen is the same amoled model/resolution, the right one just has glare from the angle.

+51% power efficiency on the 256v.

[tp4tissue]

The emoji button on laptop keyboard. 😃
🙃🫠

Wish they'd set it so if you hit enter, it'd go down instead of to the right.

[tp4tissue]

Wonder how much power usb mice transmitter use, ne1 know?

[tp4tissue]

Honestly, these machines are all overpriced.  They should be around $200 cheaper than they are now.

[tp4tissue]

OMG.. finally figured out how to switch scalers on Lunar lake.

You have to toggle back and forth between the "RETRO" scaling and "GPU" scaling. Some driver bug, it won't toggle in the menu if you go between GPU and Display. The settings won't lock/trigger.

Procedure, it wont' trigger the GPU scalar until you switch to Retro NEAREST NEIGHBOR at a NON-Native resolution,  then GO BACK to GPU(stretch) mode. Then it triggers properly. 


So now Tp4 can finally play 960x600, which is more/less the perfect Command and Conquer res for these screen sizes.  Looks great.  the Integer scalar/nearest neighbor work identically in this case.

But you have to add a Custom resolution, 960x540 // 960x600 or else the Tiberian sun exe won't detect it.

[tp4tissue]

The omen ascend 14,  checked it out at the bestbuy today. HONESTLY ? 

Good chassis rigidity.

If you accept that it's a thinner chassis with a lower TGP on the gpu.  It's pretty darn decent. and it won't pewp itself on any Real Graphics load.

The 14 Zephyrus yea, it's top dog, rigidity, build quality, stylish, but honestly, it's clunky. Got a lot of chonk feel in the hand.  Not hard to carry, but Chonker for sure.

[tp4tissue]

Nono,  it seems 768x480 is even better for 14"  bit too small for 960x600

[tp4tissue]

It's kinda hard to get ne seriouz wurk dn' on 14". Is like going back to early 2000s.

Except it's worse, because with desktop, you can get pretty close to the screen, with laptop your hand's in the way, so unless you carry a portable keyboard, and then somehow elevate the screen to eye lvl,   You can't read anything, spreadsheets are sharp but too small to operate on efficiently, general text is ok, but the flipping back and forth is a pain.

[tp4tissue]

Yea,  gamn' on laptops, still not really gud overall. You play for bout 30 mins, and you start to feel that thing in the neck, like, ugh, tightness.

[tp4tissue]

Not gn' lie,  Having proper thunderbolt usbc controller on a laptop is very nice.

It's unfortunate that most laptop came with jank usbc.

Look out for dual 4x pcie usbc thunderbolt on any new laptops, don't settle.

[tp4tissue]

Interesting observation,

If you got multiple 2.4ghz mouse, they can actually send interference to one another and kick a laptop out of sleep.

[tp4tissue]

Really should wait until RDNA 5 mobile.

[tp4tissue]

Ok, so,

Somewhat of a "gud" reason for getting a 2880/4K screen for a 14" laptop.

If you try to watch 4K/8K material on Youtube.  Because youtube uses whatever the GPU scaler is, it's usually something low power use, bilnear, or nearest,

What ends up happening is, sharp contrast lines like skyscraper windows/ silhouettes will look very aliased downsampled to 1080p using the cheap power budget scalers.

For movies, you can use the best ssim,  but for youtube, there are no settings.

IDK how important youtube quality is for most people, but  I guess this does represent a niche where you can justify 2880/4K for such a small screen.


With better scalers, it makes 0 difference at 2 feet. The caveat is, most thin/light won't be able to support ssim at 4K. This is only recently that Most igpus got enough juice to do it.  Then there's tonemapping, no igpu will be able to tonemap 4K and ssim downsample at the same time to a 2880x1800. 

igpus in the 5000-7000 passmark range will only do a 1920x800 box tonemapped.
igpus in the 7000-10000 will do a 4K box.

This is the barrier, RDNA5 might finally breach.