Within a week of Intel Meteor Lake's Dec. 14 release date, the Core Ultra 7 155H has been given a run of over 300 CPU benchmarks under Linux in a head-to-head with a Ryzen 7 7840U. This detailed testing was originally posted on Phoronix.com. The testing setup involved two laptops, with the 7840U powered by a Framework laptop while the 155H ran from an Acer Swift Go 14.
There are some core takeaways to glean from the hundreds of CPU benchmarks run. In its writeup, Phoronix provided a geometric mean of all test results done across both CPUs, which showed the AMD Ryzen 7840U enjoying a clean 28% lead in performance.
It's important to note that these are purely CPU-bound benchmarks, so the powerful iGPUs present in both CPUs aren't actually being pitted against each other in these tests.
This doesn't necessarily mean that Ryzen 7 7840U enjoys an overall 28% performance lead in Linux. In fact, in the testing of both CPUs, the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H scored higher on 75 of 370 benchmarks. This means that while the 7840U is clearly the stronger overall performer for a Linux laptop, the Core Ultra 7 155H still managed to eke out a lead in specific workloads.
These results shouldn't necessarily be taken as a permanent indictment on Meteor Lake's Linux performance. With time, Intel may be able to improve Linux's Meteor Lake support in order to provide performance standings more in line with how the chips perform on Windows.
On the Windows side, the Core Ultra 7 155H is supposedly significantly faster than the 7840U — but that's according to Intel's testing, which we haven't been able to verify with our benchmarking at Tom's Hardware just yet.
In any case, it seems like the clear winner for today between the Ryzen 7 7840U and Core 7 Ultra 155H is the 7480U — at least if you're using Linux.
