Intel Core Ultra 7 165U "Meteor Lake" Linux Performance

For those considering an Intel Core Ultra 7 165U "Meteor Lake" powered laptop, here are some benchmarks of the 165U using a Lenovo ThinkPad T14 Gen 5 compared against the Acer Swift 14 with the Core Ultra 7 155H (Meteor Lake), the AMD Ryzen 7 7840U (Zen 4) within the Framework 13, and the AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS (Zen 4) within the Framework 16 under Linux.

A Phoronix reader recently purchased a Lenovo ThinkPad T14 Gen 5 laptop and offered to provide remote access for a few days so I could run some benchmarks of the Core Ultra 7 165U (thanks Jonny!). So today's article is a first-look at the Linux performance of the Intel Core Ultra 7 165U compared to some other recent laptops I had on hand.

My Intel Meteor Lake Linux benchmarking to date has been with the Acer Swift 14 with Core Ultra 7 155H that I purchased back on launch day. Compared to the very common Core Ultra 7 155H, the Core Ultra 7 165U has 12 cores rather than 16 cores due to only having 2 P cores while having 8 E cores for both Meteor Lake SKUs. In turn the Core Ultra 7 165U is a 14-thread laptop processor rather than 22-threads with the 155H having 6 P cores. But the Core Ultra 7 165U does have a slightly higher max turbo frequency of 4.9GHz rather than 4.8GHz with the 155H. The P core base frequency is also higher at 1.7GHz on the 165U while the 155H is at 1.4GHz and then the E core base frequency is 1.2GHz on the 165U and just 900MHz on the 155H.

The Core Ultra 7 165U has just a 12MB Smart Cache compared to 24MB with the 155H. As implied with being a "U" part, the Core Ultra 7 165U has a lower power consumption with a 15 Watt base power and 57 Watt maximum turbo power compared to the Core Ultra 7 155H having a 28 Watt base power and 115 Watt maximum turbo power.

The Core Ultra 7 155H also has 8 Xe cores with its Intel Arc Graphics while the Core Ultra 7 165U has just 4 Xe cores for its Intel Graphics. However, graphics benchmarking isn't being done for today's article due to the system being loaded with Ubuntu 22.04 and the remote testing being harder to facilitate for ensuring accurate rendering, etc.

More details between the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H and Core Ultra 7 165U can be found via the Intel.com page.

In addition to benchmarking the two Meteor Lake laptops, the Framework 13 with Ryzen 7 7840U and Framework 16 with Ryzen 7 7840HS were also tested for comparison purposes. All four laptops were running Ubuntu 22.04 LTS with the Linux 6.5 kernel, GNOME on Wayland, GCC 11.4, and other defaults. The CPU package power consumption was also monitored during the benchmarking process.

Thanks again to Phoronix reader Jonny for allowing the remote benchmarking of the Lenovo ThinkPad T14 Gen 5. Let's see how this laptop is performing under Linux.