LG has announced its latest thin and light laptop, the new LG Gram 16 Pro, which will be its first laptop to feature an Intel Core Ultra CPU from the Lunar Lake family, and is now on display at IFA 2024.
LG is calling these Intel Core Ultra Series 2 processors, a reference to the fact that they are the sequel to the original Core Ultra mobile CPUs, Meteor Lake, with LG highlighting the boost in AI computing they offer. The official name is the Core Ultra 200V range (codenamed Lunar Lake, as mentioned).
This will be LG’s first laptop to qualify as a Copilot+ PC because the Lunar Lake chip is Intel’s first mobile silicon with an NPU powerful enough to meet Microsoft’s requirements—the Core Ultra CPU delivers an NPU with 48 TOPS.
However, the NPU isn’t the only factor that influences AI task performance. LG notes that the Lunar Lake CPU gets 67 TOPS thanks to the integrated GPU, and if you add in the processor’s processing power, you get a total of 120 TOPS with the high-end Lunar Lake 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 features like productivity assistants, text and image creation, and collaboration tools,” so those tasks will be done more quickly and responsively.
We've been told that LG's Gram 16 Pro is coming out in late 2024, but we've yet to get any further details on specs (or price), which will undoubtedly come.
Analysis: Much faster than a meteorite
Basically, what LG is saying is that the refreshed Gram laptop is very well equipped to handle Copilot and its AI functionality, and in particular on-device (locally processed) AI tasks. That includes typical workloads like image creation or AI-powered editing features, which are built into Windows 11’s Paint and Photos apps respectively. Generating an image, for example, will be much faster on a laptop with 120 TOPS.
To put this into perspective, if we compare it to the Meteor Lake (first-generation Core Ultra processor) featured in the LG Gram Pro 16 released earlier this year, that chip offered 34 TOPS in total (10 TOPS of which were delivered by the NPU). So Lunar Lake is not far from quadrupling AI performance in this case, which is of course a huge leap.
The much more powerful AI performance offered 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 AI-powered search Recall. That feature will be back in preview testing with Windows 11 in October and is expected to ship with the 24H2 update at some point.
