Intel Core i7 1280P "Alder Lake P" Linux Laptop Performance

In total I ran 275 raw performance benchmarks across all of the notebooks/processors available for testing today. With those 275 tests, the Ryzen 9 5900HX was the fastest 51% of the time while the Core i7 1280P was the fastest 41% of the time.

When looking at the CPU peak frequency seen out of all the cores every second for the duration of all 275 benchmarks, above is a look at how that breaks down. The Core i7 1280P did top out at its 4.8GHz rating while most often the fastest core clocks recorded were around 2.4GHz. The AMD Zen 2 and Zen 3 mobile processors tested were all frequently running at a higher frequency than the tested Intel processors/laptops.

Similarly, here is a look at the recorded CPU core temperatures over the entire span of all the benchmarks carried out. With the exception of the Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U running a bit hot, the AMD laptops tended to run cooler than the tested Intel laptops. Though it is worth noting that the MSI notebook with Core i7 1280P was running cooler than the prior Intel CPUs within Dell XPS notebooks.

Here is a look at the geometric mean across all of the raw performance benchmarks carried out from this assortment of laptops running Ubuntu 22.04 LTS with Linux 5.18. The Core i7 1280P had edged just past the Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U overall but as noted with these many benchmarks it largely comes down to the particular workloads you are interested in for how well the Core i7 1280P Alder Lake P competes with the other laptops tested.

Across all of the benchmarks carried out, the Core i7 1280P had an average reported power draw via PowerCap/RAPL sysfs of 35 Watts with a peak of 107 Watts. That was much higher than the similarly performing Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U with a 22 Watt average during the same benchmarks and a peak of just 47 Watts.

Those wishing to go through all 275 benchmarks in full plus individual CPU power / thermal results associated with each benchmark can find all of my data via this OpenBenchmarking.org result page.

For heavily threaded workloads like code compilation, CPU-based renderers, image/video encoding and the like, the Core i7 1280P had a tough time competing with even the AMD Cezanne parts tested but when it came to single-threaded performance for Python scripting, web browser workloads, and other lightly-threaded creator workloads the Alder Lake P processor did perform very well under Linux. The raw performance was great in those areas but did come with significant power costs and generally fell behind in power efficiency.

That's where things stand right now and shortly I'll (finally) have Linux benchmarks to add in as well for AMD Rembrandt (6850U) along with other follow-up articles from the i7-1280P now having Alder Lake P in my lab for Linux testing.