Most of my Intel Panther Lake benchmarking over the past two months for the new Core Ultra Series 3 hardware has been done with Ubuntu Linux given the pervasiveness of it, especially in the corporate/enterprise space. But for those looking at achieving even greater out-of-the-box Linux performance on Intel Panther Lake, the Arch Linux based CachyOS does a pretty fine job at further advancing the performance.
With Intel last year having retired their high performance Clear Linux distribution, CachyOS is now one of the out-of-the-box Linux performance leaders that leverages some of the patches and innovations spearheaded by Intel engineers during the Clear Linux period. In today’s article is a look at how the CachyOS performance compares to Ubuntu 26.04 in its near-final state as well as openSUSE Tumbleweed for exposure as another popular rolling-release Linux distribution.
The same MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI+ laptop with Core Ultra X7 358H featuring Arc B390 graphics was used for testing the out-of-the-box performance across these distributions. This laptop has 32GB of RAM and 1TB Micron NVMe SSD for pairing with this Core Ultra X7 358H SoC.
CachyOS is currently on the Linux 6.19 kernel, Mesa 26.0.3, GCC 15.2.1, and using Btrfs by default. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is quite close to the versions of major packages used by CachyOS. Ubuntu 26.04 versions also aren’t too far off either except notably Ubuntu 26.04 is using a Linux 7.0 snapshot already to be on this next kernel version in time for its debut later in April.
