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

Going into this when spending $1400 USD on a Lunar Lake laptop and excited to see how the Core Ultra 7 200V series would perform under Linux, I was much more optimistic even with acknowledging just the 8-core offerings. But with the Core Ultra 7 256V even falling behind the AMD Strix Point laptops in performance-per-Watt was disappointing. At least it's a step forward for Intel generationally with power efficiency compared to their prior laptop processors.

The AMD Ryzen AI 300 series laptops were also performing better in CPU-based AI workloads thanks to the Zen 5 CPUs offering AVX-512.

The CPU power is a big improvement generationally compared to prior Intel Core CPUs, especially for peak CPU power consumption.

On a geo mean basis across all of the benchmarks, the Core Ultra 7 256V performance in 300+ benchmarks put the Lunar Lake performance similar to that of the Core i7 1280P Alder Lake laptop. The AMD Ryzen AI 300 series laptops were around 1.6x the performance of the Core Ultra 7 Lunar Lake in these benchmarks.

If you are predominantly just using a web browser without much multi-tasking or just running some simple Python scripts and other single-threaded programs without much performance sensitive work concurrently, the Intel Core Ultra 200V series comes out nice with its good performance on the four P cores and a big step-up for power efficiency compared to Meteor Lake and prior generations. But for those running a lot of creator workloads, code compilation, and other workloads that are typically multi-threaded, the Core Ultra 7 256V within the ASUS Zenbook S 14 wasn't impressive at all. With just four P cores and four low-power E cores without Hyper Threading, the multi-threaded performance fell short not just against AMD Zen 5 but even prior Intel Core CPUs as well. The power efficiency of Lunar Lake remained in good shape and a big improvement compared to prior Intel Core CPUs, but often was still falling behind the AMD Ryzen AI 300 "Strix Point" laptops in performance-per-Watt. In only a subset of the multi-threaded tests was the Core Ultra 7 256V coming out ahead of the AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 / Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 for the best power efficiency.

It's great to see Intel making significant gains in power efficiency but at least for Linux multi-threaded workloads or those running a lot of apps concurrently, it's hard to see much value. Especially with this ASUS Zenbook S 14 with Core Ultra 7 256V is of similar price to the AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 within the ASUS Zenbook S 16. The Xe2 graphics performance issues are also disappointing. Stay tuned to Phoronix to see what of these early Lunar Lake Linux woes are addressed in the near-term and how the Core Ultra 7 200V series is able to evolve over the longer term. For now at least for the vast majority of Linux users the Ryzen AI 300 series is much more compelling over Lunar Lake.