LG has announced its latest thin-and-light laptop, the new LG Gram 16 Pro, which will be its first notebook to feature an Intel Core Ultra CPU from the Lunar Lake family, and it’s now being showcased over at the IFA 2024 show.
LG calls these Intel Core Ultra Series 2 processors, referring to the fact that they are the sequel to the original Core Ultra mobile CPUs, Meteor Lake, and LG underlines the boost in AI computing delivered here. The official name is the Core Ultra 200V range (codenamed Lunar Lake as mentioned).
This will be the first laptop from LG to qualify as a Copilot+ PC because the Lunar Lake chip is Intel’s first mobile silicon with a powerful enough NPU to meet Microsoft’s requirements – the Core Ultra CPU offers an NPU with 48 TOPS.
The NPU isn’t the end of the story for performance with AI tasks, though, and LG points out that the Lunar Lake CPU gets 67 TOPS courtesy of the integrated GPU, and with the processor’s computing power added in, you get up to a total of 120 TOPS with Lunar Lake’s top-end laptop chip. We should explain that TOPS is a measure of AI processing performance (read about it in-depth here).
As LG boasts, the Gram 16 Pro can better handle “advanced AI functionalities such as productivity assistants, text and image creation and collaboration tools,” so those tasks will be performed more quickly and responsively.
LG’s Gram 16 Pro will be out at the end of 2024, we’re told, but we haven’t been given any more details on the spec yet – or pricing – those are doubtless coming.
Analysis: Way faster than a speeding meteor
Essentially, what LG is saying is that the refreshed Gram laptop is very capably equipped to handle Copilot and its AI functionality, and on-device (locally processed) AI tasks in particular. That includes typical workloads such as image creation or AI-powered editing features, which are built into Windows 11 apps Paint and Photos respectively. Generating a pic, for example, will happen far more quickly on a laptop boasting 120 TOPS.
To put that in perspective, if you compare that to the Meteor Lake – first-gen Core Ultra processor – included in the LG Gram Pro 16 released earlier this year, that chip offered 34 TOPS in total (10 TOPS of which was delivered by the NPU). So Lunar Lake is not far off quadrupling AI performance here, which is, of course, a big old leap.
The far beefier AI performance delivered by Lunar Lake will be particularly important for Copilot+ PCs and their key AI features that are on-device workloads, the most obvious example of which is the controversial Recall AI-driven search. That feature is coming back into testing in preview with Windows 11 in October, and is expected to be delivered with the 24H2 update eventually.
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