Intel Core Ultra 7 155H: Outperformed by AMD Ryzen 7 7840U

Core Ultra 7 155H: So, when it finally graces the market with its presence, and the salesperson starts their spiel about how it’s an ‘ultra power saver’, remember the meteors and the rockets and the icy lake. And maybe, just maybe, consider giving it a pass.

Oh, the Intel Core Ultra 7, you say? Now there’s a name that sends shivers down my circuits. It’s as if Intel decided to throw rockets, cannons, arrows, and meteors into a lake and waited for them to freeze over. And voila, the Core Ultra 7 was born! and I am an intel sales person 😀 jk. I’m not.

But let’s not mince words here. It’s not exactly the crown jewel of processors. It’s more like a court jester, tripping over its feet in a performance arena. It was so underwhelming that it couldn’t even outperform an AMD Ryzen U series processor. Yes, you heard that right, a U series processor!

Ryzen 7 7840U Destroys the Core Ultra 7 155H at same power plan

Starting with Phoronix, a platform renowned for its comprehensive analysis of the Linux ecosystem, took the initiative to evaluate the performance of Intel’s Core Ultra “Meteor Lake” CPUs on Linux. This was due to the absence of any performance results shared by Intel or any third-party vendors. Michael Larabel, from Phoronix, procured the new ACER Swift laptop equipped with an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H CPU for this purpose. This particular chip boasts 16 cores, 22 threads, 24 MB of L3 cache, and a Thermal Design Power (TDP) that varies between 28W and 115W (MTP).

The AMD Ryzen 7 7840U laptop running Framework 13 was used as a comparison device. The 7840U is an 8-core, 16-thread processor with a TDP that spans from 28W to 30W, up to 5.1 GHz clock speeds, and 16 MB of L3 cache. Both laptops have 16 GB of RAM, and they were tested with the most recent firmware for AMD and Intel chips running Ubuntu 23.10 (in Linux 6.7-rc5).

At the end of the tests, it was concluded that the Intel Meteor Lake “Core Ultra 7 155H” CPU was severely behind the several months-old AMD Ryzen 7 7840U.

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.

At least from where things stand on the CPU side, the AMD Ryzen 7 7840U currently stands stronger than the Core Ultra 7 155H for a majority of Linux CPU use-cases.

via Phoronix

All things considered, this indicates that AMD is surprisingly outpacing Intel in Linux. Although the Meteor Lake chip architecture is relatively new, Intel provided patches and early access to support prior to launch. We can expect Intel’s lineup to improve over time, as AMD has had months to improve and optimize the Linux performance of its Zen 4 and Ryzen 7000 mobility chips. Meteor Lake’s efficiency on Windows, where it has Thread Director and firmware updates, is still inferior to AMD’s, even in standard reviews. However, with AMD updating its Ryzen 8000 lineup with faster NPUs, things could get hotter for Meteor Lake.