Intel Core Ultra 7 165H Meteor Lake CPU Underwhelms in Geekbench 6

It's another day and another Meteor Lake Geekbench 6 result that has cropped up. The new Meteor Lake benchmark results were spotted by resident Geekbench 6 leaker @BenchLeaks on X, who shared a new listing featuring Intel's upcoming Core Ultra 7 165H Meteor Lake CPU that packs 16 cores and 22 threads and a maximum turbo clock of 5GHz.

Sadly though, the chip results are underwhelming in Geekbench's single and multi-core benchmarks, similar to other Meteor Lake leaks we've seen in the past. The Ultra 7 165H was a touch quicker than Intel's current-generation i7-13700H, but AMD's Ryzen 7 7745HX was able to beat it by several percent.

In the single-core benchmark, the Core Ultra 7 165H scored 2,502 points, and 12,545 points in the multi-core benchmark. For comparison, we averaged out the first page of i7-13700H and Ryzen 7 7745HX results to get more realistic results. With this in mind, the existing Core i7-13700H was 9.1% slower in the Geekbench 6 single-core benchmark and 17% slower in the multi-core benchmark. So there's progress, at least.

However, against AMD's Zen 4-based Ryzen 7 7745HX, the Ultra 7 165H delivered inferior performance. AMD's chip was 6.4% and 3.2% slower respectively in the single-core and multi-core Geekbench 6 benchmarks.

The Core Ultra 7 165H's performance in Geekbench 5 isn't exactly outstanding, especially when AMD's current generation laptop CPU was able to outperform it by a smidge. However, this performance behavior is consistent with other Meteor Lake listings in the Geekbench results browser. The last one we reported on, which included a Geekbench listing for a Core Ultra 7 1002H, also showed underwhelming results with a performance margin of just 10% between itself and the Core i7-13700H.

These early benchmark leaks aren't surprising, for multiple reasons. First, they're early leaks: Meteor Lake laptops won't officially launch until December 14. Besides that, Intel isn't purely focused on improving performance with its next-generation mobile chips. Instead, it's working to improve the chip's power efficiency and functionality — the latter consisting of a more powerful "Arc-lite" integrated GPU and the integration of a hardware-accelerated machine learning chip. In fact, according to the information that we have on Meteor Lake, the architecture's efficiency cores are gaining just 3% extra IPC, and 0% more IPC on the P-cores.

The good news is that IPC doesn't rule out potential clock speed improvements, so Intel could clock these chips higher to improve Meteor Lake's performance. But, given Intel's focus on efficiency and new features, it may be okay with the lack of gains on the CPU side while it works to boost graphics and AI capabilities. We likely won't see any major performance changes once Meteor Lake launches.