Intel Lunar Lake vs. AMD Strix Point Platform Profile Performance Comparison

For those that have been eager to see more Intel Core Ultra Series 200V Lunar Lake Linux testing, here is the latest installment of testing as well as an update from Intel following my Lunar Lake Linux testing recent reports. Today's article is looking at Intel Lunar Lake versus AMD Strix Point across different ACPI Platform Profile configurations for whether you are after peak performance or the most power savings.

Back in September I had pre-ordered an ASUS Zenbook S 14 Lunar Lake laptop for being able to conduct Linux compatibility and performance testing of these interesting new mobile SoCs. But it hasn't gone quite as smooth as anticipated, especially compared to past Intel Core mobile launches that most often are working nicely out-of-the-box at launch time.

For the first benchmarks from Lunar Lake on Linux I was looking at the Intel Xe2 graphics performance on Linux which were a disappointment. The Xe2 Lunar Lake graphics with the ASUS Zenbook S 14 were slower than prior generation Meteor Lake graphics and not competing with the AMD RDNA3.5 graphics with the new Ryzen AI 300 Strix Point laptops. The Linux graphics performance was similarly much lower than on Windows 11 as pre-loaded for this ASUS laptop.

In early October I also ran some Lunar Lake CPU benchmarks on Ubuntu Linux. Lunar Lake CPU performance on Linux is nice for single-threaded workloads but for creator and programming workloads and other multi-threaded software, the Ryzen AI 300 series with Zen 5 CPU cores were performing much better.

Last week I also posted some Windows 11 vs. Linux CPU benchmarks for the Core Ultra 7 256V.

Since then I have been running some Core Ultra 7 256V with Zenbook S 14 vs. Ryzen AI 9 365 with Zenbook S 16 Linux benchmarks across all available ACPI Platform Profiles on each laptop. With the ACPI Platform Profiles to alter the power/performance heuristics, I was curious to see what difference that would make for the Lunar Lake performance relative to Strix Point and if the power-savings mode on Strix Point could help match the power efficiency of Lunar Lake.

Then yesterday I heard back from Intel on their investigation into my Xe2 graphics performance results. After they were surprised by my initial LNL graphics results, they have been able to reproduce my Linux graphics performance results and were able to figure out the root cause. The ASUS Zenbook S 14 model at least boots into a "whisper" mode. When Windows 11 boots on the ASUS Lunar Lake hardware, the ASUS software changes from "Whisper" to "Standard" operating mode. But on Linux this "Whisper" mode is retained. When running under enough load, the Whisper vs. Standard mode is said to be around a 5 Watt difference in the power budget.

Intel is now working with ASUS to figure out how to properly handle this behavioral difference under Linux. It's possible that a setting or change might be made to the ASUS WMI driver for correcting the Whisper to Standard behavior so that it matches Windows 11. We'll see but for now there is no immediate solution.

I also shared with Intel some unpublished OpenCL compute benchmarks for Lunar Lake. The results were a wash and showing various problems. Intel was able to confirm that a separate fix will be coming there. So for those wondering about Xe2 OpenCL performance, benchmarks will come after that separate issue has been resolved.

Today's article are the ACPI Platform Profile benchmarks I conducted on Ubuntu 24.10 with the Linux 6.11 kernel on the ASUS Zenbook S 16 with Ryzen AI 9 365 and then on the ASUS Zenbook S 14 with Core Ultra 7 256V. Both of these latest-gen laptops were tested using the "power", "balance_performance", and "performance" ACPI Platform Profiles. During the benchmarking process I was also monitoring the CPU power consumption, CPU peak frequency, and CPU thermals for seeing the difference from each of these profiles. Due to the Xe2 graphics woes, these benchmarks were focused just on the CPU/system performance.

The Core Ultra 7 256V has 16GB of memory while the Ryzen AI 9 365 laptop had 24GB. Both of these ASUS Zenbook laptops retail for around $1400~1500 USD. On the Ryzen AI 9 365 laptop, a patched Linux 6.11 kernel build was used for the Zen 5 RAPL/PowerCap power monitoring support but otherwise was similar to the Linux 6.11 kernel configuration used by Ubuntu 24.10.

So these are the results for AMD Strix Point and Intel Lunar Lake on Ubuntu 24.10 with Linux 6.11 right now. Given the above with regard to the ASUS Whisper mode, there will be improvements to come for Lunar Lake on Linux but the timing isn't yet clear for a solution. So just keep in mind that this is the performance right now on Ubuntu 24.10. Or in similar regard, AMD also has more Linux performance improvements coming for their Strix AI 300 series SoCs too.