From Whiskey Lake To Meteor Lake: The Intel CPU Linux Performance Evolution

Yesterday I ran through a number of benchmarks looking at how the Intel integrated graphics have evolved from the Gen9/Skylake era through the new Meteor Lake CPUs with integrated Arc Graphics. While carrying out those graphics tests with being infatuated by the performance and power efficiency of Meteor Lake integrated graphics, I also took the opportunity to run 100+ CPU benchmarks on each of these laptop CPUs / Intel mobile processor generations being tested. Here's that look at the Intel CPU performance and power efficiency comparison from Whiskey Lake to Meteor Lake.

For those hanging onto their laptops for a longer duration or just curious how the Intel CPU performance has evolved over the roughly past half-decade, this comparison from Whiskey Lake to Meteor Lake aims to address that curiosity. As with yesterday's integrated graphics comparison, it was limited by the hardware I had available that unfortunately meant missing out on any Raptor Lake laptops for example with typically having to buy laptops for Linux testing at Phoronix as opposed to review samples, given most of the major laptop vendors continuing to focus primarily on Windows. I cut the comparison off at Whiskey Lake since that is already five years old and running 100+ benchmarks can become painfully slow especially with the ultrabook era of 2c/4t processors.

Core i7 8565U - The Whiskey Lake processor from 2018 that is 4 cores / 8 threads with a max turbo frequency of 4.6GHz and a 1.8GHz base frequency. The Core i7 8565U was running within a Dell XPS 13 9380 laptop.

Core i7 1065G7 - The Ice Lake processor from late 2019 with 4 cores / 8 threads and a max turbo frequency of 3.9GHz and a base frequency of 1.3GHz. The Ice Lake CPU was within the Dell XPS 13 7390 laptop.

Core i7 1165G7 - The Tiger Lake processor from 2020 4 cores / 8 threads and a 4.7GHz turbo frequency with 1.2~2.8GHz base frequency. The Tiger Lake CPU was within the Dell XPS 13 9310.

Core i7 1280P - The Alder Lake processor from 2022 with 14 cores / 20 threads via 6 P cores and 8 E cores. The Core i7 1280P has a 4.8GHz max turbo frequency. The Alder Lake CPU was within a MSI Prestige 14 Evo laptop.

Core 7 Ultra 155H - The new Meteor Lake processor with 16 cores / 22 threads thanks to 6 P cores, 8 E cores, and 2 low-power E cores. The Core Ultra 7 155H has a 4.8GHz max turbo frequency and a 700~1.4GHz base frequency depending upon the P/E/low-E core. The Meteor Lake CPU was within the Acer Swift Go 14 that debuted on Meteor Lake's launch day earlier this month.

All of these laptops were freshly tested with Ubuntu 23.10 on the Linux 6.7-rc5 kernel and otherwise sticking to Ubuntu 23.10 defaults for that fresh Linux distribution. From there I ran 100+ CPU/system benchmarks focused primarily on laptop workloads for seeing how the Intel mobile CPU performance has evolved. For those after integrated graphics performance, all that data is in the prior article.