Intel Core Ultra 7 256V Lunar Lake With ASUS Zenbook Performing Better After New Linux Patch

On Sunday there was a new patch posted by an Intel Linux engineer to boost the Lunar Lake Linux performance out-of-the-box for ASUS laptops by adjusting the new ASUS Intelligent Performance Technology "AIPT" feature so that Linux follows the same behavior as Windows 11. My initial testing of this ASUS AIPT patch has indeed shown the Core Ultra 7 256V "Lunar Lake" yielding much better performance with this patch applied.

As summed up in that article yesterday, ASUS Intelligent Performance Technology "AIPT" is a new feature of ASUS laptops for having more thermal/power/performance controls on new laptop models. But by default the system firmware boots into the AIPT "Whisper Mode" while on Windows 11 the ASUS software then automatically sets the laptop to the AIPT "Standard" mode. Except until yesterday's patch, there's been no ability to manipulate the AIPT mode under Linux.

With the patch from Intel, the AIPT mode can now be controlled and is aligned with the platform's Power Profile mode. In turn this means when booting to Linux and using the common default of the "balanced" performance profile will then set the AIPT mode to standard rather than the lower-power whisper mode.

I ran some graphics benchmarks so far with the Xe2 integrated graphics to see the difference of this ASUS WMI AIPT patch applied to the otherwise upstream Linux 6.12 kernel. In this article are those results compared to my prior Xe2 Lunar Lake benchmarking that uncovered the performance issues where at times the new laptop's performance was slower than the generation-old Meteor Lake graphics.

This article is just a short preview / teaser ahead of completing further Lunar Lake CPU re-testing that takes several days and will have another follow-up article in the next week or so. But long story short, with this ASUS AIPT patch applied, the ASUS Zenbook S 14 performance with the Intel Core Ultra 7 256V is performing much better on Linux -- with slightly higher power use as would be expected.