Best of IFA 2024: New CPUs, new laptops, and more

Germany’s IFA trade show is typically more about coffee makers and smart-home tech than CPUs and cool laptop concepts. But with Intel and Qualcomm launching major new mobile platforms in the days leading up to the main event — Lunar Lake and lower-cost, 8-core variants of the Snapdragon X Plus — we knew there would be plenty of important and exciting products to cover.

So we descended on Berlin, and soon found ourselves overwhelmed with new laptops (and crazy laptop concepts), next-gen gaming handhelds, multi-screen keyboards, and AI, of course. chip makers and laptop designers are still trying to convince us (and consumers) that AI is the biggest tech advancement since the internet — but despite some new features and advances on the NPU side, it still feels like the early dial-up days at best.

There was nevertheless a whole lot of new hardware on display at IFA to get excited about, giving us a glimpse of what to expect in the near and not-so-near future, from power-efficient ultraportables to 600-Hz monitors and laptops that blur the line between console and PC. We’ve gathered the best of what our editors saw at IFA below. What new products and announcements are you most excited about from the show? Let us know in the comments.

Intel Core Ultra (Series 2) “Lunar Lake” 200V

By far the most interesting silicon at IFA, Intel’s Lunar Lake processors are here to take on Qualcomm’s Arm-based processors: The company promises “historic” x86 power efficiency, with a claim of 1.2 times more performance-per-watt than the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite X1E-80-100 and 2.29 times more performance-per-watt than Intel’s previous-generation”Meteor Lake” Ultra 7 165H.

Add in some pretty extreme battery life claims for x86 systems, like up to 20.1 hours of battery life with the Core Ultra 7 268V in UL Procyon Office Productivity and 10.7 hours in Microsoft Teams.

Without hyperthreading, Intel claims you get 15% more performance on P-Cores at the same power as Meteor Lake and a 30% overall gain in power/performance metrics. Intel suggests its architectural changes give Lunar Lake the fastest CPU cores on the market. And this is all with full compatibility with years and years of applications.

Throw in some bold claims about the new Arc graphics, including a 31% improvement over Meteor Lake’s Arc graphics and a 16% performance advantage over AMD’s Ryzen HX 370, and it really seems like the integrated graphics race is back.

With as many as 120 TOPS between the CPU, GPU, and NPU, it also puts Intel back in the race on AI, as long as you don’t focus exclusively on the NPU. This all makes for a very interesting — and crucial — line of mobile chips for Intel, and with a handful of premium designs at IFA, it’s looking exciting.