Intel Meteor Lake, Emerald Rapids & Other Popular Topics For December
December was dominated by news and Linux benchmarking of Intel Core Ultra 7 "Meteor Lake" as well as the new Intel 5th Gen Xeon Scalable "Emerald Rapids" processors. Plus news around Linux 6.7 and early Linux 6.8 developments were popular, initial testing of the Steam Deck OLED handheld, Ubuntu exploring x86_64-v3, and plenty of other exciting news items to close out the year.
The most popular reviews for December were easily led by Intel's Emerald Rapids and Meteor Lake announcements and my subsequent many benchmarks of those platforms (and more tests still forthcoming...):
Intel Core Ultra 7 155H Meteor Lake vs. AMD Ryzen 7 7840U On Linux In 300+ CPU Benchmarks
Last week Intel launched their Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" notebook processors. Genuinely very curious about the performance potential under Linux along with various features of these new mobile SoCs like the NPU and integrated Arc Graphics, I bought an Intel Core Ultra laptop on launch-day for carrying out Linux benchmarks. In this first review of Intel Meteor Lake on Linux is a look at how the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H performs against the common AMD Ryzen 7 7840U as the Zen 4 laptop competition.
Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu Linux Performance On The Intel Core Ultra 7 Meteor Lake
Following my Linux benchmarks of the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H processor performance where it ended up being rather disappointing but then with finding great success with the integrated Arc Graphics on Meteor Lake, like I you may be left wondering how much of a role Linux is playing with these results compared to Windows... Well, this article will shed some light on that aspect with looking at the Microsoft Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu Linux performance on the Acer Swift Go 14 Meteor Lake laptop.
Benchmarking The Experimental Ubuntu x86-64-v3 Build For Greater Performance On Modern CPUs
One of the exciting innovations currently being explored by Canonical ahead of the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS release is an x86-64-v3 build of the OS / packages. The x86-64-v3 micro-architecture feature level makes AVX/AVX2 support assumed by default as well as other modern x86_64 ISA features typically common of AMD and Intel processors the past number of years (with exceptions). Canonical's determination around what to do with a possible complementary Ubuntu x86-64-v3 build/archive is still being determined but they had released an experimental Ubuntu 23.04 based build that I decided to take for some benchmarking.
Intel Meteor Lake Arc Graphics: A Fantastic Upgrade, Battles AMD RDNA3 Integrated Graphics
Yesterday I posted the first Intel Meteor Lake Linux benchmarks that were focused on the CPU capabilities with the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H on Ubuntu Linux compared to the existing AMD Ryzen 7 7840U. The strictly CPU core performance ended up being rather disappointing with the AMD Zen 4 laptop dominating in most cases at similar or better power efficiency. But where things become much more interesting -- and competitive -- with Meteor Lake is on the integrated graphics side now featuring Arc Graphics. The benchmarks today is our first look at the new Meteor Lake Arc Graphics with the Core 7 Ultra 155H while comparing it to the RDNA3 integrated graphics found with the AMD Ryzen 7 7840U as well as the prior generation Intel integrated graphics.
GCC 13 vs. Clang 17 Compiler Benchmarks, Early Clang 18 & GCC 14 Development Benchmarks
As it's been a while since last delivering any competitive GCC versus LLVM Clang compiler competitive analysis and with the year quickly drawing a close, here's a fresh look at the GCC vs. Clang C/C++ compiler performance of various resulting application binaries tested on x86_64. GCC 13 vs. Clang 17 were tested as what's readily available on Ubuntu 23.10 Linux plus a look ahead in using the latest GCC 14 and LLVM Clang 18 development snapshots as of this week.
Meteor Lake EPP Tuning For Greater Performance Or Power Efficiency With Intel Ultra Core 7
With all of my initial Intel Core Ultra 7 155H benchmarking since last week from the Windows 11 vs. Linux performance to the integrated Intel Arc Graphics performance it was at the Linux 6.7 kernel defaults / OS defaults. But for those wanting to push the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H further for better performance or conversely wanting to extend the battery life further for devices like the Acer Swift Go 14 laptop, the Intel P-State Energy Performance Preference (EPP) can be adjusted. Here's a look at the sometimes significant difference to power and performance when adjusting the Intel Meteor Lake CPU between the default balanced performance mode and the alternative power saver and performance modes.
Intel Xeon Platinum 8592+ "Emerald Rapids" Linux Benchmarks
Following the 5th Gen Xeon Scalable "Emerald Rapids" overview, you are likely wondering about the performance claims made by Intel and how they shake up in independent testing as well as how Emerald Rapids competes against AMD EPYC Genoa(X) and Bergamo. If so this article is for you with the Phoronix benchmarks of the new flagship Intel Xeon Platinum 8592+ 64-core processors being tested in both single and dual socket modes.
From Whiskey Lake To Meteor Lake: The Intel CPU Linux Performance Evolution
Yesterday I ran through a number of benchmarks looking at how the Intel integrated graphics have evolved from the Gen9/Skylake era through the new Meteor Lake CPUs with integrated Arc Graphics. While carrying out those graphics tests with being infatuated by the performance and power efficiency of Meteor Lake integrated graphics, I also took the opportunity to run 100+ CPU benchmarks on each of these laptop CPUs / Intel mobile processor generations being tested. Here's that look at the Intel CPU performance and power efficiency comparison from Whiskey Lake to Meteor Lake.
The Performance & Power Improvement Of Steam Deck OLED's 6nm APU
The Steam Deck OLED has been on the test bench the past few weeks at Phoronix. The HDR OLED display of the updated Steam Deck handheld game console is gorgeous and was very impressed by it. On a technical level the battery life improvements are significant and one of the items I was most curious about were the power/performance implications in moving from the 7nm Van Gogh APU to a 6nm die shrink version of it while retaining the Zen 2 CPU cores and RDNA2 integrated graphics. Here's a look at the performance and CPU power consumption between the Steam Deck LCD and Steam Deck OLED models not only for gaming but other Linux workloads too.
Intel Integrated Graphics Performance From Gen9 To Meteor Lake Arc Graphics
With my Intel Meteor Lake benchmarking that began last week with the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H within an Acer Swift Go 14 laptop, the area I've been most impressed by so far with this new generation of Intel mobile processors is the integrated Arc Graphics performance. In a prior article I showed how Intel Meteor Lake graphics are a big upgrade and now competing with AMD RDNA3 integrated graphics while also capable of delivering better power efficiency. That led me to some curiosity-driven holiday benchmarking to show how Meteor Lake graphics have evolved over the past several generations of Intel mobile processors.
And then the most popular Linux/open-source news of the past month:
FFmpeg Lands CLI Multi-Threading As Its "Most Complex Refactoring" In Decades
The long-in-development work for a fully-functional multi-threaded FFmpeg command line has been merged! The FFmpeg CLI with multi-threaded transcoding pipelines is now merged to FFmpeg Git ahead of FFmpeg 7.0 releasing early next year. FFmpeg is widely-used throughout many industries for video transcoding and in today's many-core world this is a terrific improvement for this key open-source project.
Acer Aspire 1 ARM Laptop Has Nearly Complete Upstream Linux Support
With patches pending for creating an Acer Aspire 1 embedded controller driver, this Qualcomm Snapdragon powered ARM laptop has "almost full support" with the upstream Linux kernel.
systemd 255 Released With A "Blue Screen of Death" For Linux Systems
Ahead of the holidays systemd 255 has debuted as stable and comes with systemd-bsod as a "Blue Screen of Death" service capable of displaying full-screen error messages on Linux. There's also a new tool, systemd-vmspawn, that can be used for spawning virtual machines.
Fedora 40 Plans To Unify /usr/bin & /usr/sbin
One of the latest change proposals filed for Fedora 40 is to unify their /usr/bin and /usr/sbin locations.
GNOME Gets A New Terminal Choice: Prompt
A few months back GNOME developer Christian Hergert noted that Linux terminal emulators could be much faster following his experiments but then concluded at the time he didn't want to develop a new terminal becase "creating your own terminal is like 20 lines of code these days." Well, he ended up shifting stance a bit and has now announced Prompt, a new container-focused terminal emulator for the GNOME desktop.
Linux 6.6.6 Released Due To WiFi Regression
Following a bumpy weekend due to the EXT4 data corruption bug, Linux 6.6.6 is out with just a sole change for dealing with another headache: WiFi regressions.
GNOME's Dynamic Triple Buffering "Ready To Merge"
It looks like GNOME 46 might finally see the dynamic triple buffering support merged for Mutter to enhance the performance particularly for systems with integrated graphics.
Pop!_OS COSMIC Desktop Improving Multi-Monitor & Multi-Window Support
While the holidays are quickly approaching, the System76 developers working on their Ubuntu-based Pop!_OS Linux distribution and new Rust-written COSMIC desktop environment haven't been losing focus. December has been another busy month so far as they continue crafting this new modern desktop environment.
Wayland-Proxy Load Balancer Helping Firefox Cope With Wayland Issues
With this week's release of Firefox 121, Wayland is being used by default when encountering a native Wayland desktop. Shipping as part of Firefox 121 is wayland-proxy as a C++ module to serve as a Wayland proxy load balancer.
Debian Likely Moving Away From i386 In The Near Future
There was recently a mini DebConf in Cambridge where the Debian GNU/Linux release team held a spring and figured out some items moving forward, including the dim future for i386 moving forward.
KDE's Nate Graham On X11 Being A Bad Platform & The Wayland Future
As we roll into 2024, Wayland sadly is still proving to be a divisive topic with some frustrated with it either from past experiences or not all software yet being fully adapted to make use of Wayland directly with all available features. There's also some still hoping for an X11 renaissance that will never materialize. Well known KDE developer Nate Graham is out with a blog post today outlining his latest Wayland thoughts, how X11 is a bad platform, and the recent topic of "Wayland breaking everything" isn't really accurate.
AMD Publishes FSR 3 Source Code
Back in September AMD released FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 (FSR3) and at the time they noted the open-source code would be made available "soon". As a nice Christmas present, the FSR3 source code is public as of today.
Debian 12.3 Delayed Due To An EXT4 Data Corruption Bug Being Addressed
Due to a problematic patch back-ported from Linux 6.5 causing interference between EXT4 and iomap code, there's the possibility of a data corruption bug on older kernels -- most notably recent Linux 6.1 LTS point releases that can currently be found in the likes of Debian 12.
Trying Out Meteor Lake's Arc Graphics With The New Intel Xe Driver Was A Bust
With Linux 6.8 set to introduce the new Intel Xe experimental kernel graphics driver early next year, last week I ran some Xe vs. i915 driver benchmarks on various Intel Arc Graphics discrete GPUs. There's still room for bettering the performance but a nice initial entry into the kernel and easy to test out. For some Christmas weekend benchmarking I was curious to see how well the Xe kernel driver would work on the integrated graphics side with the new Meteor Lake processors.
Linux 6.8 Dropping Support For Very Old Graphics Drivers
A new drm-misc-next pull request was sent today to DRM-Next bringing a few notable changes for the upcoming Linux 6.8 merge window.
The First Rust-Written Network PHY Driver Set To Land In Linux 6.8
Since Linux 6.1 when the very initial Rust infrastructure was added to the Linux kernel there's been a lot of other plumbing and house keeping merged since for enabling kernel drivers to be written in the Rust programming language. With the upcoming Linux 6.8 kernel cycle, the first Rust network driver is set to be introduced.
Enlightenment 0.26 Released With Various Improvements
It's been two years since the release of Enlightenment 0.25 and now just ahead of Christmas there is Enlightenment 0.26 released by Carsten Haitzler.
Linux 6.7-rc7 Released Early Ahead Of Christmas Eve Festivities
New upstream Linux kernel releases are typically issued on Sunday evenings (US time) but Linus Torvalds has released Linux 6.7-rc7 a day early in preparations for Christmas Eve festivities.
Steam Linux Marketshare Surges To Nearly 2% In November
Steam on Linux enjoyed a various nice boost in popularity during the course of November at least as it concerns Valve's Steam Survey.
Firefox 121 Now Available With Wayland Enabled By Default
Ahead of tomorrow's official announcement, the Mozilla Firefox 121.0 release binaries have hit the mirrors and it's keeping to the most exciting Christmas gift for Linux desktop users: Wayland support enabled by default!
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