Last week I began publishing the many exciting Panther Lake benchmarks under Linux from the interesting CPU performance and efficiency to the much anticipated Xe3 graphics with the Intel Arc B390 graphics. Up today is a look at how the out-of-the-box performance for the Intel Core Ultra X7 358H compares under Microsoft Windows 11 and the current Ubuntu Linux 26.04 development state.
For those curious if Linux is as competitive to Windows 11 on the new Panther Lake laptop SoCs or if there are are even performance advantages to Linux for better scheduling across the P / E / LPE cores, this benchmark is for you. The testing looked at the performance of Microsoft Windows 11 Home as it shipped on the MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI D3MTG MS-14T2 with all available Windows 11 updates as of launch week. Then loading Ubuntu 26.04 in its current development state paired with the Linux 6.19 kernel and Mesa 26.1-devel graphics drivers for a leading-edge look at how Panther Lake is performing on Linux just past launch.
The same MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI Panther Lake laptop was used for all the testing with its Core Ultra X7 358H with 16 cores, 32GB of LPDDR5-8533 Micron MT62F2G32D4DS-026 memory, 1TB Micron 2500 NVMe SSD, and the Arc B390 integrated graphics.
The testing on both Ubuntu and Windows 11 was with its default options, including the use of the balanced platform profile on both Windows and Linux. Only after having already wiped away the Windows partition was I informed about the rather significant performance uplift to the performance profile due to MSI setting their balanced profile power limits rather low and lower than Intel recommends for this class of laptops. In any event it’s a 1:1 between Windows and Linux with the same balanced profile being used.
From there a variety of CPU and graphics benchmarks were run on this MSI Prestige laptop for seeing how the launch state compares between Windows and Linux. Thanks to Intel for supplying the MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI D3MTG MS-14T2 review sample for making this Panther Lake Linux testing possible.
