AMD Ryzen AI 300 Series Dominates Intel Core Ultra 7 Lunar Lake Performance For Linux Developers & Creators

Earlier this week I delivered initial Intel Xe2 Lunar Lake graphics benchmarks on Linux while today the focus is on Lunar Lake's CPU performance. The Xe2 graphics performance under Linux was disappointingly slow with it performing even worse than Meteor Lake while RDNA3.5 graphics led. Intel has been investigating the Xe2 Linux graphics performance but I haven't heard any updates yet. Today the attention is on the Lunar Lake CPU side under Linux and it too isn't looking too good. The performance of this 8-core Core Ultra 7 256V SoC is poor in real-world multi-threaded scenarios and the performance-per-Watt is only compelling in a subset of workloads. The AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 and AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 Zen 5 SoCs tended to deliver the superior performance and power efficiency under Linux.

When I pre-ordered the ASUS Zenbook S 14 Lunar Lake laptop to be able to deliver Lunar Lake Linux benchmarks, I didn't expect it to be this rough. Even last year when ordering the Acer Swift Go 14 Meteor Lake laptop on launch day, that initial Linux performance for the Core Ultra 7 155H was in much better shape than what I am seeing out of the ASUS Zenbook S 14 under Linux on an Ubuntu 24.10 daily pre-release.

It's possible there is something quirky going on with the ASUS Zenbook S 14 and its firmware/BIOS under Linux comparative to Windows, but that isn't yet confirmed and nothing more than speculating what may be hindering Lunar Lake on Linux. In any event the ASUS Zenbook S 14 is also what Intel supplied to various other reviewers as part of the Windows Lunar Lake testing, so the Zenbook S 14 is presumably one of their leading EVO-certified Lunar Lake laptop options for now. And this isn't some pre-production laptop either but a retail, Best Buy purchased Lunar Lake laptop with the latest ASUS firmware as of this past week when initially booting up Windows 11 on the device.

In any event in this article are the initial CPU benchmarks of the Intel Core Ultra 7 256V under Ubuntu 24.10 while running a Linux 6.12 Git kernel as of this past week for the very latest upstream kernel support. All the other laptops tested were also re-benchmarked using the Ubuntu 24.10 snapshot for an up-to-date software stack. With having bought this laptop, I'll be running many more tests over the weeks/months to come. Hopefully there are some miraculous Linux fixes/optimizations ahead otherwise this has been a rather lackluster Intel launch for Linux users.

The Core Ultra 7 256V Lunar Lake SoC features four P cores, four low-power E cores, a 2.2GHz base frequency, and 4.8GHz maximum turbo frequency. The Core Ultra 7 256V has a 17 Watt base power rating and 37 Watt maximum turbo power. This SoC has a 12MB smart cache and has 16GB of LPDDR5X-8533 memory. The Core Ultra 7 256V features Arc Graphics 140V which were tested separately in the article earlier this week. Today's article is looking at just the CPU/system performance.

The ASUS Zenbook S 14 with Core Ultra 7 256V with 16GB of RAM is equipped with a 1TB NVMe SSD, 14-inch 3K OLED display, and is an Intel EVO certified laptop. As mentioned in the prior article this ASUS Zenbook S 14 has worked well with WiFi out of the box, the Intel Arc Graphics Xe2 when on a new enough kernel (or backported to Linux 6.11 on Ubuntu 24.10), etc, but the performance has been below expectations. The ASUS Zenbook S 14 costs $1399 USD plus tax.

The other laptops/CPUs tested for this comparison included:

Intel Core i7 1185G7 "Tigerlake" - Dell XPS 13 9310
Intel Core i7 1280P "Alder Lake" - MSI 14 Evo
Intel Core Ultra 7 155H "Meteor Lake" - Acer Swift 14 Go
Intel Core Ultra 7 256V "Lunar Lake" - ASUS Zenbook S 14
AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 "Zen 5" - ASUS Zenbook S 16
AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 "Zen 5" - ASUS Zenbook S 16

All laptops were tested in the default balanced power profile and other defaults on Ubuntu 24.10 across the various AMD / Intel laptops.

The selection was limited by the time for re-testing other laptop models on Ubuntu 24.10 and limited by the laptops I had available. Most often I am forced to buy laptops retail for Linux testing on Phoronix with few exceptions.

So let's see how the Intel Core Ultra 7 "Lunar Lake" performance is looking under Linux both for performance and CPU power efficiency. The CPU power consumption was monitored on each laptop using the RAPL/PowerCap interfaces.