Following recent leaks, like Lunar Lake MX from a few weeks ago, Twitter user @miktdt has uncovered the existence of Lunar Lake-based "200-Series" Intel Core Ultra 5 on the Open.Intel platform. There is even a reference to "XE_LUNARLAKE," which seemingly corresponds to the Intel Iris Xe2 Low Power Graphics (LPG) on this Core Ultra 5 chip.
The specific CPU identified in this leak is the Intel Core Ultra 5 234V, although we have no idea what that "V" stands for in this particular application. Lunar Lake architecture is targeted at laptops and other mobile devices, so it could pertain to those platforms. It's also worth noting that despite this new CPU being on a cutting-edge new architecture, SMT/Hyperthreading isn't enabled for any of the cores — so you get eight cores and eight threads across the board.
This Intel Core Ultra 5 234V leak could possibly be the same unidentified Lunar Lake CPU we identified in February. That CPU also had 8 cores and 8 threads split between P-Cores and E-Cores (it also had seemingly mismatched L2 and L3 cache sizes). Unfortunately, we don't have any additional specs readings for this leak, so we can't confirm they're the same CPU; we can only speculate.
In any case, the repetition of 8-cores, 8-threads without the presence of Hyperthreading may point toward a future of Intel CPUs without Hyperthreading, at least in the mobile space. Arrow Lake samples also don't feature Hyperthreading. Considering the performance benefits of HT for multi-tasking and non-gaming workloads, it's something of a surprise to see Intel shed it for mobile CPUs this time around, but maybe the P-Core/E-Core split and NPU addition will offset that loss.
Finally, we don't know what to expect regarding performance from Iris Xe2 graphics, particularly the Xe2-LPG (Low Power Graphics) version of the iGPU. However, the generational improvement of Meteor Lake's Arc graphics compared to previous Intel iGPUs was impressive, so hopefully, Xe2-LPG will remain competitive when we see it launched with these Lunar Lake CPUs.
