But if the new product wins, the gap with competitors is huge
Today's tests of the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H processor under Linux showed that the new Intel product is significantly inferior to the 15-watt Ryzen 7 7840U with higher power consumption. The authors of Tom's Hardware decided to separately test Meteor Lake in tasks related to AI, and use tools developed by Intel itself for this purpose.
In particular, tests were carried out in Audacity and GIMP applications using the Intel OpenVINO plugin. More precisely, we are talking about four tests: OpenVINO Stable Diffusion, OpenVINO Music Generation, OpenVINO Whisper Transcription and OpenVINO Noise Reduction.
It turned out that, despite the optimization, not everything is so wonderful with the new Intel CPUs.
But let's start with the good. In the first test, the Core Ultra 7 155H, with both the NPU and GPU enabled, performs well compared to its predecessor and competitor. The Core Ultra 5 125H performs just as well. In this mode, the new processors are twice as fast as the Core i7-1370P and even more ahead of the Ryzen 7 7840U. If you use only the GPU, since the NPU unit in this task is used only by new processors, Meteor Lake still turns out to be much faster. Similar results can be seen in the music generation test.
But in the other two tests everything is much worse for new Intel products. In both, the Ryzen 7 7840U is ahead, although here the difference between the processors is much smaller, regardless of the pair being compared. Even more interesting is that in both tests the Core i7-1370P also turns out to be faster than more modern Intel processors.
What’s interesting is that in one of the tests, if we compare the results only when processor cores are used, the Ryzen 7 7840U will be more than twice as fast as the Core Ultra 5 125H.
Separately, the authors note the benefits of the NPU block. In those modes where this particular block was used, its load reached 100%, while the CPU was not loaded at all. And when calculating on the CPU, the latter’s load was 60%. That is, using NPU should be beneficial from the point of view of autonomy.