AMD Ryzen AI 300 Series Dominates Intel Core Ultra 7 Lunar Lake Performance For Linux Developers & Creators!
Written by Michael Larabel
Earlier this week I delivered initial Intel Xe2 Lunar Lake graphics benchmarks on Linux while today the focus is on Lunar Lake’s CPU performance. The Xe2 graphics performance under Linux was disappointingly slow with it performing even worse than Meteor Lake while RDNA3.5 graphics led. Intel has been investigating the Xe2 Linux graphics performance but I haven’t heard any updates yet. Today the attention is on the Lunar Lake CPU side under Linux and it too isn’t looking too good. The performance of this 8-core Core Ultra 7 256V SoC is poor in real-world multi-threaded scenarios and the performance-per-Watt is only compelling in a subset of workloads. The AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 and AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 Zen 5 SoCs tended to deliver the superior performance and power efficiency under Linux.
When I pre-ordered the ASUS Zenbook S 14 Lunar Lake laptop to be able to deliver Lunar Lake Linux benchmarks, I didn’t expect it to be this rough. Even last year when ordering the Acer Swift Go 14 Meteor Lake laptop on launch day, that initial Linux performance for the Core Ultra 7 155H was in much better shape than what I am seeing out of the ASUS Zenbook S 14 under Linux on an Ubuntu 24.10 daily pre-release.
It’s possible there is something quirky going on with the ASUS Zenbook S 14 and its firmware/BIOS under Linux comparative to Windows, but that isn’t yet confirmed and nothing more than speculating what may be hindering Lunar Lake on Linux. In any event the ASUS Zenbook S 14 is also what Intel supplied to various other reviewers as part of the Windows Lunar Lake testing, so the Zenbook S 14 is presumably one of their leading EVO-certified Lunar Lake laptop options for now. And this isn’t some pre-production laptop either but a retail, Best Buy purchased Lunar Lake laptop with the latest ASUS firmware as of this past week when initially booting up Windows 11 on the device.
