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.
The first point I liked about the Intel Meteor Lake launch was actually having firm hardware availability on launch day. Compared to AMD Ryzen laptop SoC announcements where products don't often appear for weeks or months, with Meteor Lake there were a few laptop models readily available in the US from multiple Internet retailers on day one. With Intel not sharing any Linux benchmarks and no other Linux numbers on Meteor Lake or detailed support information, I ended up buying a Meteor Lake laptop on launch day -- and with most laptop vendors not being particularly interested in Linux coverage with review units compared to the Windows masses.
The laptop I found on launch day that fit my requirements was the Acer 14" Swift Go 14 laptop. This laptop features the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H, 16GB of LPDDR5x RAM, a 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD, 1920 x 1200 touchscreen, and integrated Arc Graphics. All of this for only $999 USD as a launch-day laptop model was quite an attractive price point.
The Intel Core Ultra 7 155H is a 16-core / 22-thread processor comprised of 6 P cores, 8 E cores, and 2 low-power efficient cores. The P cores top out at 4.8GHz, there is 24MB of Intel Smart Cache, a 28 Watt base power rating, 115W maximum turbo power rating, and 65W maximum assured power rating. The Core 7 Ultra features integrated Arc Graphics clocking up to 2.25GHz. All Meteor Lake processors feature the Intel AI Boost NPU that will be explored in a separate article.
The AMD Ryzen 7 7840U as a reminder is an 8-core / 16-thread part made up entirely of Zen 4 cores, there is a 3.3GHz base clock and 5.1GHz boost clock, 16MB of L3 cache, and a default TDP of 28 Watts while having a configurable TDP from 15 to 30 Watts. The Ryzen 7 7840U features Radoen 780M integrated graphics and Ryzen AI as their alternative to the Intel NPU but Ryzen AI is not currently supported on Linux. The AMD Ryzen 7 7840U testing for this article was done via the Framework 13 laptop.
I'll have more on the Linux support/compatibility on the Acer Swift Go 14 in a separate article, but long story short it's not without some headaches. Besides the Meteor Lake graphics not being stable until Linux 6.6, out-of-the-box on Ubuntu 23.10 the wired and wireless networking wasn't even working. But will save that for a separate dedicated article with this just focusing on the Intel COre Ultra 7 155H performance against the AMD Ryzen 7 7840U.
This testing on both the AMD and Intel laptops was done on Ubuntu 23.10 while upgrading to the Linux 6.7-rc5 kernel and latest linux-firmware.git for the best experience possible currently available for Linux users for both Intel Meteor Lake and AMD Phoenix. With Linux 6.7 all key functionality of this Acer laptop and Intel Core Ultra 7 155H (Meteor Lake) were working. Each laptop was tested at its respective defaults on Linux.
This initial article is only looking at the general CPU performance of the Ryzen 7 7840U versus the Core Ultra 7 155H. A follow-up article to be published shortly is focusing on the Arc Graphics performance and there will be follow-up articles looking at the Meteor Lake NPU performance on Linux as well as a broader Linux laptop performance comparison. Apologies for the delay due to only having this laptop since last Friday as a consumer as opposed to a review sample in advance.