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

Starting with the web browser benchmarks, here at least in these commonly single-threaded workloads the Lunar Lake performance was good. With Speedometer 3.0 the Core Ultra 7 256V was delivering leading performance over prior Intel notebooks and the AMD Ryzen AI 300 series performance.

The Core Ultra 7 256V was also delivering leading performance-per-Watt in this benchmark. Lunar Lake is a big power efficiency improvement over Meteor Lake and prior.

With Google Chrome the Speedometer 3.0 performance was also in great shape on Linux for this Lunar Lake laptop.

With the Jetstream 2.0 benchmark in Firefox, the Core Ultra 7 256V was delivering by far the best performance but when it came to performance-per-Watt the AMD Zen 5 SoCs were in the lead.

With Jetstream 2 in Google Chrome it was similar to Firefox with the Lunar Lake laptop delivering the best performance but falling short of the Zen 5 laptops for the best performance-per-Watt.

The web browser performance was one of the main real-world areas where the Lunar Lake laptop performed well on Linux.

When it came to code compilation, the Core Ultra 7 Lunar Lake SoC with just eight physical cores and no SMT, it performed very poorly. The Core Ultra 7 256V performance for compiling the Linux kernel was slower than not only Meteor Lake but also the Alder Lake Core i7 laptop tested. The AMD Ryzen AI 300 laptops compiled the kernel in nearly half the time of the Core Ultra 7 256V.

The Core Ultra 7 256V was consuming less power than the other laptop CPUs which is nice if you are doing a lot of code compilation on battery while traveling or other environments, but the AMD Zen 5 SoCs can also be reduced to a more power-saving mode if desired.

For software developers or even those running source-based Linux distributions like Gentoo or Arch Linux, the Lunar Lake performance is very slow but not too unexpected given the eight physical cores without SMT/HT and only four of those being P cores.

The AMD Ryzen AI 300 series performance was leading with compile times being close to half that of the Core Ultra 7 Lunar Lake while consuming just a few Watts more on average.