Intel Meteor Lake on Linux: benchmarks show 93% of launch day performance two years later
Phoronix revisited Intel’s Core Ultra 7 155H “Meteor Lake” on Ubuntu Linux, using the same Acer Swift Go 14 laptop purchased at launch. The goal was to see how performance shifted after two years of kernel, compiler, and driver updates, ahead of expected Panther Lake laptop news at CES next week.
The launch-era tests from December 2023 used Ubuntu 23.10 with the Linux 6.7 kernel and Mesa 24.0-devel graphics drivers via the Oibaf PPA. The end-of-2025 retest used an Ubuntu 26.04 daily build with the Linux 6.18 kernel, GCC 15.2, and Mesa 25.2. The comparison covers 215 benchmarks that still build and run cleanly on the newer stack.
The result went the wrong way. Across the full set, the geometric mean landed at about 93% of the original performance , and 151 out of 215 tests were faster at launch than they are now. Power consumption was also reported as roughly similar between the two runs, so the drop does not appear to come with a clear efficiency gain.
Source: Phoronix
In comparison to AMD, the same end-of-year coverage cited around an 8% gain for AMD Krackan Point over six months, about a 6% geo-mean improvement for Intel Lunar Lake during 2025, and around 5% improvement for AMD Strix Point since launch as of October. On desktops, Intel’s Core Ultra 9 285K “Arrow Lake” was also reported as up about 9% in 2025 while using less power.
One possible contributor mentioned is Intel’s Branch History Injection mitigation. The article also mentions that Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite on Linux had a disappointing 2025 as well. You can read that review here . The updates for ARM-based SoC released within the year have removed many of the improvements seen earlier in 2025. But it’s not like Qualcomm isn’t 100% focused on Windows on ARM anyway, are they?
Source: Phoronix
