Prior to the official debut of Intel’s upcoming “Meteor Lake” mobile processors, which are apparently scheduled for December 14, early performance assessments of the upcoming Intel Core Ultra 7 155H have surfaced, revealing relatively modest results compared to current generation AMD Ryzen offerings.
The performance figures come from Bilibili, the Chinese video sharing platform from a user who goes by Corbcas, a laptop equipped with the Intel Ultra 7 155H configuration exhibited solid synthetical integrated graphics performance on 3DMark Time Spy.
However, its CPU performance in Cinebench fell short of expectations.
Intel is notably behind the competition when it comes to producing the fastest and most potent chips, as the company has seemingly waved the white flag in terms of the race for the desktop market as the company has effectively recycled Raptor Lake, which at its core is effectively a revision of the 12th Generation Alder Lake, Intel’s first actual architectural leap in half a decade.
Excluding Rocket Lake of course.
Meteor Lake is Intel’s next true Core revision, with the Core Ultra 7 155H being part of this progression. Considering the limited information available on higher-tier CPUs, such as the Core Ultra 9 185H, the 155H could potentially claim the position as the second-fastest H-class CPU within Intel’s current generation.
In a second video that showcases performances of Meteor Lake, the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H faced off against the Ryzen 7 7840HS and the previous generation Core i5-13500H processors.
The Intel Core Ultra 7 155H features 6 performance cores, 8 efficient cores, and 2 low-powered efficient cores that are integrated into the SoC tile, the 155H aims to strike a balance between performance and efficiency, which is the whole point of Intel’s endeavor, to recapture performance and efficiency leadership from mobile offerings by AMD.
The Core Ultra 7 155H is characterized by its key specifications, encompassing a substantial 24MB of L3 cache. Notably, it operates with base and boost frequencies at 3.8 GHz and 4.8 GHz, respectively. Furthermore, it is speculated that the chip is equipped with a complete 8 Xe-Core iGPU configuration, as evidenced by its reported impressive score of 3077 points in the 3DMark Time Spy Graphics test.
However there is no actual indication of the sort of RAM the device itself is leveraging, with RAM speed being the main bottleneck when it comes to low power integrated graphics solutions, regardless this score is substantially higher than the iGPU offerings from previous generation Core processors which is a certainty as it’s based on Intel’s ARC Alchemist derived Xe-LPG “architecture”.
A Time Spy graphics score of around 3,000 points is actually quite alright for integrated graphical options, it’s essentially on par with AMD’s Radeon 780M offerings when strapped to 6400MHz LPDDR5 memory, so at first glance you’d look at the Meteor Lake scoring and believe that Intel could very well be onto a winner here at least in terms of its graphical performance.
Sorta, but not really. You see Intel’s ARC Alchemist graphics cards really favor synthetical workloads such as 3DMark’s Time Spy scenario, with their flagship dGPU, the ARC A770 scoring around 14,000 graphics scoring on Time Spy, which is greater than that of AMD’s Radeon RX 6700 XT and NVIDIA’s RTX 3060 Ti even.
If synthetical performances were actually indicative of gaming performance, Intel would have life so much easier, because the actual reality of gaming performance on ARC Alchemist isn’t pretty.
Despite being on a more refined TSMC processing fabrication, the ARC A770 falls behind in comparison to the aforementioned RX 6700 XT and more or less falls in-line with NVIDIA’s RTX 3060 in terms of actual gaming performance, not the Ti, but the standard RTX 3060.
Another GPU performance metric is an OpenCL performance benchmark, I am guessing Geekbench 5. Which is another test that usually favors Intel Core processors over AMD Ryzen offerings but that’s strictly when it comes to actual CPU performance tests and not graphical.
According to Wccftech’s own performance characteristics, the ARC A770 yields slightly below the scoring of the faster Radeon RX 6700 XT, while the ARC graphics card performs slightly ahead of NVIDIA’s RTX 3060 of which in reality it essentially trades blows with on a regular basis, so with that in mind even with a slightly elevated score line versus actual expectations, the Ryzen 7 7840HS still walks away with a ~11% lead over the Meteor Lake unit.
The metrics also showcase the Intel Core Ultra 5 125H which features two less performance cores and possibly a reduction in overall Xe-Cores as well, either way, the integrated graphics solution on the Core Ultra 5 125H is over 15% lower than that of the Core Ultra 7 155H.
Compared to the Core i5-13500H, even the slower Core Ultra 5 unit showcases a monstrous 60+ percentage improvement thanks to the ARC Alchemist derived graphics solution within Meteor Lake.
So realistically speaking, it’s quite likely that the iGPU performance of Meteor Lake won’t actually be as impressive as AMD’s Radeon 780M which consists of 12 CU’s of current generation RDNA 3 hardware.
At least when compared to the integrated solution present inside of the Core i5-13500H, Meteor Lake is a much needed improvement, so let’s move onwards with the actual CPU side of things because the main thing about Meteor Lake is that it’s a brand new architecture as opposed to Alder / Raptor Lake.
Cinebench is my favorite video game, though it has quickly gone out of fashion in recent years following AMD’s continual advancements in single core performance has left a sour taste in the mouths of devoted tech loyalists worldwide.
When it comes to multi-core performances Meteor Lake isn’t looking like the architectural leap that Intel truly needs right around now to maintain level pegging versus AMD’s ever evolving Ryzen processors, across Cinebench R15, R20 and R25 we see comparable performances between essentially all four processors.
Keep in mind that the Core Ultra 7 155H is equipped with a total of 16-cores, segmented into a 6+8+2 configuration, while the Core i5-13500H comes with a total of 12-cores, segmented into a 4+8 configuration.
While the Ryzen 7 7840HS has a more civilized 8 performance cores and 16 threads.
When it comes to MT performance on Cinebench R15, the Ryzen takes a marginal lead, as the Ryzen 7 7840HS leads the previous generation Raptor Lake i5-13500H by 4.68% followed by the Meteor Lake Core Ultra 7 155H which is 11.17% behind the AMD processor, and happens to be just over 6% behind the previous generation architecture.
Cinebench R20 shows a similar fate unfortunately, with the Raptor Lake i5 leading the charge here over AMD’s CPU with 5,531 points. The Core Ultra 7 155H is actually beating the Ryzen 7 7840HS by 4.6%, however it still falls short of the previous generation i5 by 3.55%.
Cinebench R23 is finally where Meteor Lake can spread its wings as it take charge, with all 16 of its cores squeezing out a multi-threaded score of 15,523, a 6.5% improvement over the Raptor Lake based i5 which mind you has two less performance cores at its disposal, so a more realistic comparison to the i5 would be against the Core Ultra 5 125H of which gets flogged by over 14.6%.
At least in Cinebench R23 Meteor Lake pulls out the victory over the 8/16 Ryzen by a staggering 17.4%.
So it’s a tossup really, synthetics absolutely mean nothing as we’ve previously seen Intel produce a “new architecture” that shows promise in synthetics only to result in regressive gaming performance (Rocket Lake), but if I was being genuinely honest, this level of performances aren’t boding well for Intel’s 15th Generation Desktop CPUs (Arrow Lake).
I don’t know what to think if Intel once again produce another steaming lemon with regressive performance, with AMD continually making great strides in what ARM zealots perceive to be a “dying” x86 architecture, Intel does not stand a goddamn chance, and it also means that I will be personally bent over by AMD directly in terms of pricing for Zen 5.
We’re going to have to wait just a little longer before we can truly see Meteor Lake in action and more accurately gauge and reference Intel’s new architecture in terms of improvements made to IPC (Instructions Per Clock) and most certainly efficiency which is absolutely a characteristic that Intel needs to rectify if they wish to actually maintain relevance in the x86 market, especially mobile devices.
Which brings us to battery life, a metric that AMD Ryzen processors have been absolutely dominating Intel Core CPUs on mobile devices, and nothing has changed.
And by “nothing has changed” I mean in the sense that AMD continues to absolutely obliterate Intel’s upcoming Meteor Lake CPUs, which was basically a given, Intel would be better off scrapping the Core architecture outright if they want to reign supreme in terms of battery life and power consumption.
However, the takeaway with Meteor Lake is that it shows substantial improvements versus the previous generation Raptor Lake CPU, which is hardly known for being very kind to the environment, considering how the i9-14900K can boil water.
Across several different scenarios, such as video playback, web browsing and bright screen standby, the Core Ultra 7 155H provides on average 28.94% longer battery life versus the previous generation Core i5-13500H, with the largest gains could be seen in terms of video playback which saw an increased longevity of 46.29% while during standard web browsing the Core Ultra 7 155H lasted 34.39% longer, even while doing absolutely nothing the Meteor Lake chip manages to provide an increased battery life of 6.14%.
AMD’s Ryzen 7 7840HS walks away with the efficiency crown, on desktop and mobile you simply cannot stop the power of Zen, which thrashes Meteor Lake in terms of battery life by 18% on average and even as much as ~17% on idle.
Meteor Lake’s improvements can be seen but they’re still a far way behind AMD, despite the dedicated media engine offloading mundane tasks to the embedded “LPE” cores, alongside the Intel 4 fabrication process it just still isn’t enough.
From what I’ve seen today I’m not hopeful that Meteor Lake and Arrow Lake for that matter are going to be a big enough leap to even consider Intel Core processors moving forward, Intel as a company are in a really bad state, and while they had effectively five whole years of milking the Skylake uArch, AMD wasn’t anywhere near as competitive in terms of performance and efficiency during that time period.
Now they are and Intel are truly feeling the hurt as they continually bleed market shares in all markets, desktop, mobile and especially servers. Intel’s own slides projected a mere 5% increase in effective single core performance for Arrow Lake over Raptor Lake’s Refresh, that is not enough, in terms of peak performance computing Meteor Lake from this early assessment looks to be dead on arrival, or at least it’ll be completely worthless once AMD’s Zen 5 roles around.
