It has barely been more than a week since Intel officially unveiled its brand new Core Ultra “Meteor Lake” processors, with their brand new architecture barely receiving any actual independent reviews and performance evaluations, despite this Intel’s own skewed in-house performance metrics showed a regression in single-threaded performance versus previous generation Raptor Lake processors.
However, outlets such as NotebookCheck haven’t been singing the praises of Intel’s latest CPUs, showcasing not just inferior performance but also efficiency versus AMD Ryzen processors which are over a year old by comparison.
And now Phoronix have released their performance evaluation of the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H “Meteor Lake” processor, pitting it against the AMD Ryzen 7 7840U across various performance tests inside of a Linux environment.
Phoronix are one of the most trustworthy sources of information when it comes to performance testing and evaluations of high-end server grade AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon processors, though more often than not they primarily focus on Linux performance with various CPUs, such as the plethora of mitigations Intel have deployed for the various vulnerabilities of their Core processors that have continually been discovered over the past five years.
Michael Larabel recently acquired the latest ACER Swift laptop equipped with an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H CPU. Which incorporates 16 cores, 22 threads, in a 6+8+2 configuration, 24 MB of L3 cache, and a configurable thermal design power (TDP) ranging from 28W up to 115W turbo.
And unsurprisingly, their performance evaluation of the Meteor Lake Core Ultra 7 155H processor, with Phoronix absolutely slamming the Intel chip in favor of the AMD Ryzen 7 7840U which dominates majority of the performance metrics including efficiency.
With AMD’s Ryzen processor being victorious over Intel’s supposed architectural leap in 80% of their performance tests, which according to Phoronix they compared the two across 370 individual scenarios.
The Ryzen 7 7840U is an 8-core, 16-thread processor equipped with 16 MB of L3 cache, achieving clock speeds of up to 5.1 GHz. It comes with a thermal design power (TDP) that varies from 28W and can scale up to 30W, a far cry from Intel’s turbo 115W mode.
Both laptops come with 16 GB of LPDDR5x memory and underwent testing on Ubuntu 23.10 (in Linux 6.7-rc5) using the latest firmware for both AMD and Intel chips.
The technology publication conducted an extensive array of 370 benchmarks, encompassing browser tests, HPC, content creation, video encoding, code compilation, audio encoding, AI benchmarks, PyTorch, GIMP, Python, PHP scripting, and various other metrics.
The comprehensive testing revealed that, ultimately, the Intel Meteor Lake “Core Ultra 7 155H” CPU lagged significantly behind the AMD Ryzen 7 7840U, which at this point in its lifecycle is considered a relic in the ever evolving tech landscape.
In terms of overall CPU-to-CPU performance, the AMD Ryzen 7 7840U demonstrated an average of 28% faster performance, all while operating at similar or even lower power levels. This outcome is particularly noteworthy, given that Meteor Lake was anticipated to mark Intel’s comeback with class-leading efficiency with their supposed industry leading Intel 4 processing node with a proclaimed 25% boost to performance-per-watt.
When taking the geometric mean of all 370 benchmark results, the Ryzen 7 7840U enjoyed a 28% lead over the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H in these Linux CPU performance benchmarks.
This was all the while the Ryzen 7 7840U was delivering similar or lower power consumption than the Core Ultra 7 155H with these tests on Ubuntu 23.10 with the Linux 6.7 kernel at each system’s defaults. The Core Ultra 7 155H also had a tendency to have significantly higher power spikes than the Ryzen 7 7840U.
Moreover, it’s important to note that the comparison was made between Meteor Lake-H and the Ryzen 7000U chip. This wasn’t even one of AMD’s high performance (HS) SKU, which would have delivered even better performance and likely maintained a similar efficiency advantage.
Phoronix has additional testing in the pipeline, including examinations of the ARC Alchemist derived integrated graphics found inside of Meteor Lake versus the RDNA 3 based Radeon 780M and similar graphics offerings from AMD Ryzen mobility processors alongside neural processing unit (NPU) AI performance in future reviews of Core Ultra CPUs.
Overall this essentially proves what we’ve already seen beforehand, Meteor Lake is an underwhelming disappointment, with some metrics showcasing regressive single-core performance versus Intel’s previous generation, mobility chips for the most part have clockspeed regressions to look forward to due to the immaturity of Intel’s 4 processing node.
After half a decade of stagnation stuck on the Skylake architecture, Intel have been making decent strides in the form of Alder and eventually Raptor Lake, maintaining competitiveness with AMD Zen 3 and Zen 4 CPUs but Meteor Lake seems to be a half-baked lemon, a stepping stone for what will eventually become Arrow Lake, of which if that comes out to be another failure akin to Rocket Lake, I cannot foresee Intel ever digging themselves out of this particular hole.
5 nodes in 4 years? Given the hilarious blunders that have befallen Intel’s 10nm and 7nm production, I doubt anyone is actually buying into this rubbish outside of retarded investors.
Stagnation or possibly regression at this point in time would ultimately result in the inevitable death of Intel as a company, as it continues to make overambitious promises, releasing manipulative and spiteful marketing tactics, as the company plans to offload its CPU production onto TSMC silicon, the current situation for Intel in the x86 industry is dire.
