Intel Lunar Lake Linux Benchmarks Are Still Forthcoming

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Intel Lunar Lake Linux Benchmarks Are Still Forthcoming

While there were many Windows reviews/benchmarks out Tuesday for Intel Core Ultra 200 Series "Lunar Lake" laptops on various websites, Linux tests are still awaiting due to having resorted to pre-ordering a Lunar Lake laptop myself for delivering Linux support/compatibility information and performance benchmarks. But hopefully by this time next week will be the initial data set...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Lunar-Lake-Linux-Forthcoming

[sophisticles]

I trust we will be seeing some Windows vs Linux benchmarks as well?

@Michael: Side note, have you considered selling the hardware you pay for out of pocket on eBay or some similar platform after you are done with testing, as a way of recouping some of the costs?

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

Looking forward to it! General assumptions seemed to hold true on the Windows side from the reviews I skimmed.

• Strong single thread performance
• Mediocre multi threaded performance
• Good efficiency
• An iGPU that fluctuates between outstanding and WTF depending on the game / driver issues

I've taken my Steam Deck on my last few work trips in case I wanted to play some games on the odd night I didn't have a group dinner to attend, and it's been a pretty shit experience. It's "okay" for games, but sucks for everything else, and it's gargantuan for a handheld and awkward to pack.

I just picked up a new open box HP Dragonfly Elite G3 with Alder Lake for $600 to take on my next few trips. 14 hours of battery life, a nice 13.5" 1920x1280 3:2 display, 32GB of RAM, the 96 EU iGPU seems to perform similarly to the deck, and it starts at 1 kg (2.2 lb). I think that kind of ultra portable will be where Lunar Lake shines. In a few years, picking up one of those for cheap with LL or a Ryzen AI set at 17W with the 890M iGPU would be a phenomenal little travel machine.

[Anux]

Hm, Intels Radeon 480 strategy, supply the masses with the smallest, lowest-end die possible. Not sure how much more expensive N3 is but 140 mm² should be much cheaper to produce than 230 mm² Strix on N4P. But then there is the IO tile and the interposer, maybe a few bucks saved for the platform due to on chip RAM.

What Intel needs to nail here is efficiency and roughly match performance for a good price and they are back in the game. Desktop will be much harder after 13/14 gen failure and handling thereof.

[numacross]

Looking forward to it! General assumptions seemed to hold true on the Windows side from the reviews I skimmed.

• Strong single thread performance
• Mediocre multi threaded performance
• Good efficiency
• An iGPU that fluctuates between outstanding and WTF depending on the game / driver issues

I've taken my Steam Deck on my last few work trips in case I wanted to play some games on the odd night I didn't have a group dinner to attend, and it's been a pretty shit experience. It's "okay" for games, but sucks for everything else, and it's gargantuan for a handheld and awkward to pack.

HotHardware's review shows that Intel's newest design still trades performance for battery life by slowing down when not running on AC power:
dell-xps-13-lunar-lake-ac-vs-battery-cinebench-st.png
This is not something I've seen tested in many reviews, so maybe Michael can test this even with a few ST and MT benchmarks.

[numacross]

Adding MT results in a separate post since only one attachment per post limit is in place:
dell-xps-13-lunar-lake-ac-vs-battery-cinebench.png

[mlau]

Too bad lunar lake wasn't out 1 month ago; i really regret buying the x1e laptop now.

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

HotHardware's review shows that Intel's newest design still trades performance for battery life by slowing down when not running on AC power:
dell-xps-13-lunar-lake-ac-vs-battery-cinebench-st.png
This is not something I've seen tested in many reviews, so maybe Michael can test this even with a few ST and MT benchmarks.

For completeness, as shown in some of the tests in that same review, AMD's Ryzen AI 300 fares as badly or worse in some cases on battery vs. plugged in. Only the ARM Qualcomm / NUVIA parts do pretty well there.

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

Too bad lunar lake wasn't out 1 month ago; i really regret buying the x1e laptop now.

What did you buy and what are your quick thoughts on it?

[mlau]

What did you buy and what are your quick thoughts on it?

I bought the Lenovo Yoga Slim7x.

* Windows sucks royally. You can't use the device before you let MS spy on your Wifi, and then you need that ms account. Otherwise this thing is a useless brick. IMO Windows 11 is what is holding this thing back big time.
* You can do all of the boring windows stuff with it (Office Online, Webbrowsing).
* No driver updates anywhere (esp. for graphics which are hilariously bad at times).
* the usb-c ports are very fragile, I managed to break one just by repeatedly replugging the dock (to get linux running).
* no really usable media player either, vlc just crashes.

* Getting linux to run on it is a real pain. I managed to gain "persistence" with the the bootloader after 2 weeks of trying (the EFI variables which control boot entries are NOT available after the kernel calls EFIs "ExitBootServices()". In the end I had to enter some entries by hand using a efi shell, while the keyboard has ~1 second lag in the shell) So you can forget efibootmgr and bootctl and updating secureboot keys from userspace.
I'm sure there's a efi bootloader out there that can do the required things, but I didn't look for one. I've been using Gentoo for 25 years.
* Hardware support in Linux (as of 6.11) is still bad; you need the right kind of combination of built-in and modules to get it booting to userspace, and need to extract some signed firmware files from windows (which is easy) to get e.g. the gpu working.
* ath12k linux does not work with my unifi accesspoints.
* no sound although it's supposed to work. The soundcard in the usb-c dock does work though.
* simply running "eglinfo" in the shell with mesa from 2weeks ago oopses the kernel.
* no camera/sensors/.. support.
What works is usb, touchscreen, keyboard, pci/nvme and fbcon.

* The CPU is surprisingly fast, even though it's the cheapest sku (X1E-78-100, without turbo, just 3.4ghz base). Its 12 cores compile one of my pet projects slightly faster than my 7950x3d (12s vs 14s seconds)
With one of my test programs, on normally compiled code, perf shows ~3,5insn/clock, similar to the 7950, with PGO it's somteimes still ~20% faster and sometimes slower but only 1,5 insn/clock. (the 7950 goes up to 4,5 insn/clock and executes the program more than twice as fast). So there's probably still some optimization potential left in cpu core and compiler.
* The oled display is awesome, to me it's the best thing about this machine. I won't buy any new laptop without one that has at least similar image quality.