Following [1]the ASUS AIPT patch posting this weekend from an Intel Linux engineer that was analyzing my previously-published Lunar Lake results showing rather poor performance on the ASUS Zenbook S 14, the performance has been looking much better. On Monday I posted [2]updated Intel Xe2 graphics results showing strong uplift now that the ASUS Lunar Lake laptop was operating in its standard mode rather than whisper mode. In today's article is data from more than 400 CPU/system benchmarks to see how the Core Ultra 7 256V performance has improved with this new Linux kernel patch and compared to the prior AMD Ryzen and Intel Core laptop comparison data.

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The focus on this article are fresh Intel [4]Lunar Lake numbers under Linux with the ASUS Intelligent Performance Technology (AIPT) posted by Intel on Sunday. Since then using the same [5]ASUS Zenbook S 14 as used previously for my Lunar Lake Linux coverage, I've been running fresh benchmarks off Linux 6.12 Git plus the patch applied. The laptop was tested in its default configuration just as the other Linux distributions were as well on Ubuntu 24.10.

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As with the prior articles, the other comparison laptops included the Core Ultra 7 155H Meteor Lake within the Acer Swift Go 14, the Core i7 1280P Alder Lake within an MSI 14Evo laptop, and a Core i7 1185G7 Tiger Lake laptop within the Dell XPS 13 9310. On the AMD comparison side were the ASUS Zenbook S 16 laptops with the Ryzen AI 9 365 and Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 Strix Point SoCs.

Cutting to the chase, with this newest run of the Intel Core Ultra 7 256V on ASUS Zenbook S 14, the default Linux performance shoots up by 22% compared to my original Lunar Lake results after buying this laptop for Linux testing... Originally the Core Ultra 7 256V geo mean performance was similar to Alder Lake while now it's just ahead of the Core Ultra 7 155H Meteor Lake. But it still does fall well behind the AMD Strix Point laptops with these ~400 benchmarks conducted.

With the AIPT patch applied, the Core Ultra 7 256V was consuming around 19.8 Watts on average and a peak of 37 Watts, compared to 11.8 Watts previously and a former 28 Watt peak. That's to be expected with ASUS AIPT in standard mode rather than being bound to whisper mode. This CPU power data over the span of the 400+ benchmarks is all the more meaningful against the geo mean data when comparing Meteor Lake to Lunar Lake. The geo mean performance of the Core Ultra 7 256V was only slightly ahead of the Core Ultra 7 155H, but it was doing so at around 63% the power use. Even with the higher power use of the AIPT standard mode operation, the Lunar Lake power use continues being a big improvement over older Alder Lake and going back to Tigerlake era laptops too if you have long upgrade cycles for your laptops.

On average the Core Ultra 7 256V power use was similar to the Ryzen AI 9 365 and Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 laptops at 19 Watts across the entire span of benchmarks, so Strix Point is still coming out ahead overall for power efficiency at least under Linux with this ASUS laptop comparison.

Let's move on to some of the individual benchmark data.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Lunar-Lake-ASUS-AIPT

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-lunar-lake-aipt-xe2

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=lunar-lake-linux-improved&image=lunar_lake_improved_lrg

[4] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Lunar+Lake

[5] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Lunar-Lake-Linux-Zenbook

[6] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=lunar-lake-linux-improved&image=lunar_lake_cpuinfo_lrg