From Whiskey Lake To Meteor Lake: The Intel CPU Linux Performance Evolution

In total I ran 114 benchmarks on these five generations of Intel Core mobile processors. When looking at the peak CPU frequency observed every second during the entire duration of benchmarks carried out, here's how that peak frequency comparison looks:

On average the Core Ultra 7 155H within the Acer Swift Go 14 was having a peak frequency of around 2.9GHz, well better than the 2.1GHz average of the Core i7 1280P with the MSI Prestige 14 Evo notebook. Plus the Core Ultra 7 155H has two more cores and two more threads than that Alder Lake i7-1280P processor. The only processor with a higher average for the peak frequency was the Core i7 1165G7 Tiger Lake SoC within a Dell XPS laptop with a 3.0GHz average. The Core Ultra 7 155H was successfully hitting the 4.8GHz rated max turbo frequency for the P cores albeit was not a common occurrence.

More interesting is looking at the CPU/SoC power consumption over the entire duration of benchmarks conducted. The Core Ultra 7 155H during these 114 Linux benchmarks saw an average power consumption of 28 Watts and a peak of 65 Watts. The average power consumption was similar to the Core i7 1280P and Core i7 1185G7.

When taking the geometric mean of every single raw performance benchmark carried out -- including both single and multi-threaded workloads -- the Core Ultra 7 155H was around 17% faster than the Core i7 1280P Alder Lake SoC or 36% faster overall than the Core i7 1185G7. In some single threaded workloads the Meteor Lake processor fell behind the Alder Lake laptop and in a few cases heavily leveraging AVX-512 even the aging Ice Lake and Tiger Lake processors did the best thanks to their AVX-512 support.

With web browsers was one of the most common areas where the Core Ultra 7 155H fell behind the Core i7 1280P.

Similarly, for single-threaded Python scripts the performance between Meteor Lake and Alder Lake was about the same aside from better power efficiency on the new Intel Core Ultra platform.

If doing a lot of code compilation on the go, the Core Ultra 7 155H with 22 threads did provide a big improvement over the prior generations across those tests of building the Linux kernel, LLVM, FFmpeg, and the Godot game engine.

Across creator workloads of video encoding, Blender, RawTherapee, image encoding, audio encoding, OpenSCAD, and other creator apps, the Core Ultra 7 155H was on average 27% faster than the Core i7 1280P.

In any event as we close out 2023, hopefully you found this data insightful and look for more Intel Meteor Lake benchmarks on Linux in the new year.