We benchmarked a retail model Asus Zenbook S 14 with Intel's new and true AI-ready Lunar Lake platform and saw standard-setting battery results.

Ultra-thin and light laptops like the Asus Zenbook S 14 live and die by their battery life. No one likes forever hunting for outlets, and that's particularly frustrating with computers designed to be highly mobile;

Intel first discussed the mobile architecture it calls Lunar Lake way back in June, and stated at the time it would arrive in Q3. The initial reveal included some lofty performance claims, so we've all been waiting to find out if those numbers were marketing BS or the real deal.

Lunar Lake is Intel’s Snapdragon killer. Intel’s Core Ultra Series 2 (Lunar Lake) was specifically designed to emphasize low power, but with competitive performance. In this it somewhat succeeds, though the Core Ultra 7 258V chip I tested can still run a distant second,

We tested Intel's latest Lunar Lake GPU in the Core Ultra 9 288V to see how it stacks up against both the previous generation Meteor Lake graphics as well as AMD's Ryzen AI graphics, Radeon 890M. There are promising signs but also lingering concerns about Intel's drivers and optimizations.