According to in-depth testing from Phoronix, Intel’s latest Lunar Lake mobile CPUs are not performing well in Linux benchmarks.
The Linux-focused publication tested the Core Ultra 7 256V found inside Asus’s Zebook S14, which doesn’t support Linux. The lack of official support for Linux on Lunar Lake laptops might raise some eyebrows regarding testing. Still, Intel has released Linux updates crafted explicitly for Lunar Lake throughout 2024 and even 2023. Phoronix also tested two Zenbook S16 laptops equipped with Ryzen AI 300 APUs, the AI 9 HX 370 and AI 9 365, and like the Zenbook S 14, they do not officially support Linux either.
In over 300 benchmarks, the 265V only scored a few victories over the Ryzen AI 300 chips, doing well almost solely in encryption, random read, video encoding tests, and Python, Perl, and JSON benchmarks. But when Lunar Lake lost, it lost hard, sometimes to the point where the Ryzen AI 300 APUs racked up double the performance. The average performance for these chips reflects that, as the AI 9 365 was 57% faster.
However, Lunar Lake even struggled against its predecessors; not only did the Meteor Lake-based Core Ultra 7 155H outperform the 265V by 24% on average, but the Alder Lake-powered Core i7-1280P from 2022 barely eked out a win, too. The 265V did at least beat the Core i7-1185G7 from 2020, a Tiger Lake processor.
Phoronix did note that the 265V was at least power efficient and did well in single-threaded benchmarks, but it lost primarily when workloads could utilize more threads. That’s not entirely surprising since Lunar Lake caps out at four E-cores and four P-cores, while both the 155H and 1280P have more E- and P-cores. Intel’s latest CPU is more geared towards lighter and less performance-focused laptops, similar to the M3 in the MacBook Air.
But clearly, something other than Lunar Lake’s architectural design must be at play. In our review of the Zenbook S14 with the Core Ultra 7 258V (which is just a tad faster than the 256V), we found that Lunar Lake was nipping on the heels of the 155H and even the AI HX 370 in multi-threaded benchmarks like Cinebench 2024. Phoronix speculates these performance problems could either be down to the laptop precisely (perhaps a firmware problem) or something to do with how Lunar Lake interacts with Linux.
Some strange things are happening with Lunar Lake in the Zenbook S14. Somehow, the higher-end Core Ultra 9 288V model of the S14 performs worse than the 258V-equipped model, which is incorrect. Intel claims this is because of an issue with the laptop’s current BIOS. However, it’s unclear if this problem is also responsible for the poor performance Phoronix demonstrated in Linux.
