Intel is working hard to convince the tech world that it can finally take on Arm, saying it “turned over every rock” in designing the Core Ultra 200V.

Arm-based chips have increasingly made headway against Intel’s dominance in the desktop and server markets. Apple helped get the ball rolling with its Arm-based M-series of chips, delivering performance that rivals Intel’s best, while simultaneously deliver far superior battery life. The tech industry took note, with Qualcomm’s Arm-based Snapdragon chips offering similar performance.

Intel engineers say the competition with Arm-based chips caused the engineering teams to go back to the drawing board.

“We had new competition showing good performance – roughly equal to what we have – but with much lower power,” said Arik Gihon, Intel senior principal engineer of SoC Architecture.

One of the main decisions the teams had to make was choosing to design a more purpose-built chip, rather than one designed to serve a wide range of PC categories. The new chip would be designed almost exclusively for thin laptops and fanless devices, such as tablets.

“The story was efficiency,” Gihon explains, “and we literally turned over every rock.”

The company says its efforts were successful, yielding the energy-efficient Core Ultra 200V.

The result is Core Ultra 200V. It’s a processor to power AI PC laptops that draws as much as 40% less power than its predecessor, which itself was a radical re-architecture focused on efficiency. The new Core Ultra delivers several more hours of battery life — and, critically, similarly large gains in performance, graphics and AI.

Intel’s engineers focused on better utilizing the chips Efficient-cores (E-cores) versus the Performance-cores (P-cores).

“Thanks to Thread Director updates, along with enhanced power management decisions, we can monitor all of this at a milliseconds level,” said Intel Fellow Rajshree Chabukswar. “And we can change based on the type of work that we are running – do I need to burst up my frequency or do I need to be conservative? That gave us a lot of benefit.”

“When Lunar Lake runs on battery, we use Windows hetero-scheduling, which means we start from the Efficient-cores and move up,” Chabukswar added. “We have a new feature called OS containment where we try to keep the work on E-cores as much as possible.”

Heavier loads are shifted to the P-cores, which quickly shut down once the heavier workload is completed.

The end result is a chip Intel believes will allow it to compete with Arm’s performance, while at the same time maintaining the compatibility the Intel and Microsoft world is accustomed to.

“It’s one of the biggest projects we ever did in terms of architecture shift,” Gihon said. “When we look at the competition, and we look at where we are, we are pretty satisfied.”