Intel Core Ultra 7 155H CPU Fails Miserably Against The AMD Ryzen 7 7840U In Linux Benchmarks

Phoronix has published their review of the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H “Meteor Lake” CPU against the AMD Ryzen 7 7840U in Linux which gets utterly demolished across 370 tests in both performance and efficiency.

Intel Core Ultra 7 155H “Meteor Lake” CPU Gets Destroyed In Linux Performance & Efficiency Tests By AMD’s Ryzen 7 7840U At Same Or Lower Power

Known for its in-depth look at the Linux ecosystem, Phoronix took it upon itself to measure the performance of the Intel Core Ultra “Meteor Lake” CPUs in Linux since neither Intel nor any 3rd party vendor shared those results. Michael Larabel went out and purchased the new ACER Swift laptop featuring an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H CPU. This chip has 16 cores, 22 threads, 24 MB of L3 cache, and a TDP that ranges from 28W and up to 115W (MTP).

For comparison, an AMD Ryzen 7 7840U laptop (Framework 13) was used. The 7840U is an 8-core and 16-thread chip with 16 MB of L3 cache, up to 5.1 GHz clocks, and a TDP that ranges from 28W and scales up to 30W. Both laptops feature 16 GB of memory and were tested in Ubuntu 23.10 (in Linux 6.7-rc5) using the latest firmware for both AMD and Intel chips.

The tech outlet ran an impressive 370 benchmarks ranging from browser tests, HPC, content creation, video encoding, code compilation, audio encoding, AI benchmarks, PyTorch, GIMP, Python, PHP Scripting, and more. At the end of the tests, it was concluded that the Intel Meteor Lake “Core Ultra 7 155H” CPU was severely behind the several months-old AMD Ryzen 7 7840U.

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The @Intel Core Ultra 7 155H #MeteorLake vs. @AMDRyzen 7 7840U On Ubuntu Linux In 300+ CPU Benchmarks

With 370 CPU tests, the @AMD Zen 4 SoC was faster than the new Meteor Lake 22-thread CPU on #Linux in 80% of the tests & 28% faster geo mean overall.https://t.co/S2oqbvfYqu

— Phoronix (@phoronix) December 19, 2023

For comparison, the AMD Ryzen 7 7840U CPU outperformed the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H in 80% of the 370 tests with the blue team only managing a 20% lead in these benchmarks. In overall CPU-to-CPU performance, the AMD Ryzen 7 7840U offered an average of 28% faster performance at similar or lower power which is simply insane considering Meteor Lake was expected to be Intel’s return to form with class-leading efficiency.

Furthermore, the comparison was between Meteor Lake-H and an AMD Ryzen 7000U chip, this wasn’t even a 7000(HS) SKU which would’ve offered even better performance and likely retained a similar efficiency lead. Phoronix also plans on sharing more testing such as iGPU (Arc Xe vs RDNA 3) and NPU AI performance in upcoming reviews of Core Ultra CPUs.

Michael sums up the situation perfectly in his conclusion:

When taking the geometric mean of all 370 benchmark results, the Ryzen 7 7840U enjoyed a 28% lead over the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H in these Linux CPU performance benchmarks. This was all the while the Ryzen 7 7840U was delivering similar or lower power consumption than the Core Ultra 7 155H with these tests on Ubuntu 23.10 with the Linux 6.7 kernel at each system’s defaults. The Core Ultra 7 155H also had a tendency to have significantly higher power spikes than the Ryzen 7 7840U.

At least from where things stand on the CPU side, the AMD Ryzen 7 7840U currently stands stronger than the Core Ultra 7 155H for a majority of Linux CPU use-cases.

via Phoronix

Currently, the AMD Ryzen AI isn’t fully supported on Linux as pointed out by Phoronix. Overall, this shows that Intel is shockingly falling behind AMD in Linux. The Meteor Lake chip is a relatively new architecture but Intel was offering patches and early support before launch. Surely, AMD has had months to fix & optimize the Linux performance of its Zen 4 and Ryzen 7000 mobility chips and we can expect Intel’s lineup to get better as time passes by. Even in standard reviews, Meteor Lake is still behind AMD or similar in terms of efficiency on Windows where they have Thread Director plus firmware updates but with AMD refreshing its Ryzen 8000 lineup with faster NPUs, things may get a little more heated for Meteor Lake.

Do read the full review of Intel’s Core Ultra Meteor Lake CPUs in Linux at Phoronix and also check out their full benchmark tests at Openbenchmarking.org.