Intel Xe2 Lunar Lake Graphics Performance Disappoints On Linux

[AdrianBc]

Sure. Even with Winblows the generational uplift promised by Intel is not there. Intel is now a slideshow company. Very pretty slides just like AMD. But....blue.

Most Windows benchmarks of Lunar Lake that I have seen have confirmed the claims of Intel that it provides a better laptop battery life than the Apple and Qualcomm laptops.

The single-thread performance of Lunar Lake is also excellent, even if not as good as of the latest Apple CPUs.

The multi-threaded performance of Lunar Lake is poor, but that was expected for a CPU designed for 17 W, which cannot compete with CPUs designed for 28 W or more, like AMD Strix Point or Intel Meteor Lake, unless the power consumption of those is also limited to 17 W.


The only thing that can be criticized in the Intel initial presentations is that almost all benchmark results have been shown for the top model, 288V. The top models of Lunar Lake, 288V, 268V and 266V will not be available at all at many vendors of Lunar Lake computers, while at the few vendors that will offer them, e.g. ASUS, they will be offered only in overpriced products. Most Lunar Lake computers will be available with CPUs up to 256V or 258V, like the laptop bought here by Michael.

While the 288V used by Intel in benchmarks has 5.1 GHz/3.3 GHz turbo/base clock frequencies, 258V/256V has only 4.8/2.2 GHz turbo/base clock frequencies.

So most Lunar Lake users will have an experience that does not match the benchmarks published on many sites. The benchmarks that will be published here later will show lower results than those published by Intel, but more representative for what most users can get.

[AdrianBc]

What a complete disaster !!

Strengthens my belief Intel will actually be bought by either ARM or Qualcomm. They're the only two CPU designers that could teach Intel after 50 years how to make a chip that is both power efficient AND performant.

And on top of all that bullshit by Pat Gelsinger about how their fabs are going to fab the world's supply of chips and how Intel's "Angstrom" process was so nifty. Now they're trying to spin it off. The banks and the shareholders are already pressuring Intel to sell itself for parts to get that sweet sweet shareholder "return". Perhaps that's because they all know Intel is now incapable of building good chips anymore and making money from that. Better to break up Intel and sell the parts off for quick cash.

If Intel were bought by Qualcomm or Arm or other similar companies, that would be a real disaster for all personal computers.

All those companies provide much less technical documentation for their products and much less open source device drivers. The personal computers would become like the mobile phones, which cannot be trusted at all by their owner that they are not doing actions that are in fact hostile to the supposed owner, who has paid money for a product without receiving absolute control over it, as it would be expected when *buying* something, not renting/leasing it.

The Intel and AMD CPUs also have undocumented parts that could be Trojan horses, but at least those undocumented parts are much more limited in what they can do and if the owners use an open-source operating system and they are careful to avoid things like exposing to the Internet the built-in networking interfaces, they can be reasonably confident that the computer that they own does only what they want.

On a device with a Qualcomm CPU it is impossible to reach a similar level of trust.

[Jumbotron]

If Intel would be bought by Qualcomm or Arm or other similar companies, that would be a real disaster for all personal computers.

All those companies provide much less technical documentation for their products and much less open source device drivers. The personal computers would become like the mobile phones, which cannot be trusted at all by their owner that they are not doing actions that are in fact hostile to the supposed owner, who has paid money for a product without receiving absolute control over it, as would be expected when *buying* something, not renting/leasing it.

The Intel and AMD CPUs also have undocumented parts that could be Trojan horses, but at least those undocumented parts are much more limited in what they can do and if the owners use an open-source operating system and they are careful to avoid things like exposing to the Internet the built-in networking interfaces, they can be reasonably confident that the computer that they own does only what they want.

On a device with a Qualcomm CPU it is impossible to reach a similar level of trust.

Actually better yet, let Nvidia buy Intel but let them run it as a wholly owned subsidiary. Starting after the Panther Lake run of chips let Nvidia bolt on Geforce iGPUs onto Intel SoCs. Drop the entire line of Intel discreet GPUs which were poorly engineered Radeon knock-offs seeing as how it was half of AMD's Radeon team that built them when they were hired by Intel. The US government shouldn't have a problem with it. After all an American CPU company, AMD, was allowed to buy a Canadian GPU company called ATI, so why not let an American GPU company, Nvidia, buy an American CPU company, Intel? Now you will have hardware coordination under one roof which will please big clients like the Datacenters, and HPC and Supercomputers. All Intel systems will also automatically come with Nvidia GPUs. Gone will be shitty Day One support on Linux. Seed some of Nvidia's best CPU engineers over to the x86 side of things in Intel land to finally have a competitive product against AMD's Zen and Epyc. Nvidia finally gains x86 license because they now own Intel. And to be magnanimous and to calm government fears they can renegotiate the x86 license with AMD for even better and cheaper terms than Intel now has with AMD so as to get better terms for AMD64 in return.

Oh right...day one after the buyout, Jensen Huang fires Pat Gelsinger

[Sonadow]

Most Windows benchmarks of Lunar Lake that I have seen have confirmed the claims of Intel that it provides a better laptop battery life than the Apple and Qualcomm laptops.

That's the only benchmark that matters on a laptop PC.

[coder]

No real surprises here, if you want robust Linux support you need to wait for a few months, maybe more, regardless if you are using AMD or Intel.

Expecting Linux to offer excellent support on day one of new hardware release is naive at best, overzealous at worst.

Even with NVIDIA's proprietary drivers, sometimes you have to wait a few releases to get full and reliable support.

I'll have to bookmark this post for the next AMD CPU or GPU launch with less than perfect day 1 support. I'm sure you won't be so generous, then.

[coder]

Nope...Intel is done. Not as a going concern.

Not sure I agree with all of your points, but one thing you left out was the loss of Chinese demand for Intel CPUs. I'm sure that was helping pad out their profitability quite nicely. China looking to become more self-sufficient has got to be one of the biggest blows to Intel, yet it doesn't seem to get a lot of attention. Probably because there's nothing Intel can really do about it, but it's still hitting them regardless.

[coder]

Most Windows benchmarks of Lunar Lake that I have seen have confirmed the claims of Intel that it provides a better laptop battery life than the Apple and Qualcomm laptops.

Intel actually claims only to have efficiency equivalent to that of the M3, which is made on the same TSMC manufacturing node. With Qualcomm, it's slightly "unfair", since they're still on an older node. That means Oryon might still be a better core, but it's being held back.

The single-thread performance of Lunar Lake is also excellent, even if not as good as of the latest Apple CPUs.

It's a little surprising, when you consider that Apple is stuck at 128-bit NEON. So, they're at a disadvantage for any vector-FP.

The multi-threaded performance of Lunar Lake is poor, but that was expected for a CPU designed for 17 W,

It should be comparable to the Apple M3, but it's not.

[coder]

Actually better yet, let Nvidia buy Intel but let them run it as a wholly owned subsidiary.

Given they weren't allowed to buy ARM, there's no way this would fly.

Drop the entire line of Intel discreet GPUs which were poorly engineered Radeon knock-offs seeing as how it was half of AMD's Radeon team that built them when they were hired by Intel.

They're not RDNA. They're much closer to previous gen Intel iGPUs, from what I can tell.

The US government shouldn't have a problem with it. After all an American CPU company, AMD, was allowed to buy a Canadian GPU company called ATI,

AMD was a pure CPU company and ATI was a pure GPU company. No real conflict of interest, there.

so why not let an American GPU company, Nvidia,

Except they're not. Ever heard of Tegra or Grace? Plus, Nvidia bought Mellanox, so they're also in other businesses.

buy an American CPU company, Intel?

As you pointed out, Intel also makes GPUs. Also AI accelerators, which might be a bigger concern. Gaudi 3 is one of the closest to being able to compete with Nvidia.

Then, there's the matter of MobilEye, which competes with Nvidia's self-driving SoCs.

Seed some of Nvidia's best CPU engineers over to the x86 side of things in Intel land to finally have a competitive product against AMD's Zen and Epyc.

AFAIK, the only custom CPU cores Nvidia designed were the Denver cores. Those didn't do too well, which is probably why they stopped.

I hope this was an attempt at satire. Otherwise, I'd say don't post while you're stoned.

[AdrianBc]

AFAIK, the only custom CPU cores Nvidia designed were the Denver cores. Those didn't do too well, which is probably why they stopped.

After Denver, NVIDIA has designed the Carmel core, which was much better than Denver.

The main use of Carmel has been in the NVIDIA Jetson Xavier modules.

Unlike Denver, Carmel has implemented the more modern Armv8.2-A ISA.

While Carmel was much better than Denver, its performance was only equivalent with that of Cortex-A75, despite the fact that it was launched at the same time with Cortex-A76, which was significantly faster (and Carmel had a lower energy efficiency than either Cortex-A75 or Cortex-A76).

Seeing that they cannot keep up with the Arm designers, NVIDIA has abandoned the design of CPU cores and for Orin, the successor of Xavier, they have licensed Cortex-A78 cores from Arm. In later projects, like Grace, they have continued to license Arm cores, e.g. Neoverse V2.

At least NVIDIA is not ashamed to say clearly which cores they have licensed from Arm and which cores are used in each of their products.

For all CPUs included in the SoCs designed by Qualcomm in recent years, Qualcomm does not say on their site or in their marketing materials which Arm cores are used, but they replace the well known Arm names with some obscure internal part numbers, attempting to obfuscate the characteristics of their products, to make more difficult the comparisons with competing products.

[coder]

After Denver, NVIDIA has designed the Carmel core, which was much better than Denver.

Thanks. I knew there were multiple, but I forgot if the other was Denver 2 or what it was called.

I wish there were more information about them. I don't know how we can know just how good they really were (or weren't), but they did stop making them and switched back to licensing ARM's IP.

Was Carmel another VLIW-like core, like Denver?

At least NVIDIA is not ashamed to say clearly which cores they have licensed from Arm and which cores are used in each of their products.

Hmmm... not sure how clearly advertised that was.

For all CPUs included in the SoCs designed by Qualcomm in recent years, Qualcomm does not say on their site or in their marketing materials which Arm cores are used,

Yeah, this always bugs the heck out of me. Luckily, it's not hard to find out via a quick web search or two.