Given the significant gains to the Intel Arrow Lake performance on Linux since launch that I showcased last month on Phoronix, I was also eager to see how the Intel Lunar Lake performance has evolved since its debut last year. In this article is a look at those relatively weak launch-day Linux performance numbers for the Core Ultra 7 256V compared to where they are performing now on Ubuntu 25.04 for showing how far the Intel Lunar Lake performance has evolved since last September.
For looking at the Lunar Lake Linux performance I used the ASUS Zenbook S14 that I have been using for all of my Core Ultra 7 256V testing and my lone Lunar Lake device up until recently getting my hands on the wonderful Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition. I had bought the ASUS Zenbook S14 for Linux testing last September on launch-day for being able to provide independent Linux compatibility testing and performance benchmarking.
The ASUS Zenbook S14 is equipped with the 8-core Core Ultra 7 256V with 16GB of memory. The Zenbook S14 has evolved quite nicely and with modern Linux distributions like Fedora Workstation 42 and Ubuntu 25.04 delivers a nice full-featured experience while being much more performant than at launch. The main downside of the ASUS Zenbook S14 is no LVFS/Fwupd integration for BIOS updates like you can find with the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen13 and other Lenovo products under Linux.
As a reminder back in September the original Lunar Lake testing was with an Ubuntu 24.10 snapshot and using a Linux 6.11 kernel build along with Mesa 24.3-devel for supporting the Xe2 integrated graphics with Lunar Lake. Now with Ubuntu 25.04 on the Linux 6.14 kernel and Mesa 25.0 there is nice out-of-the-box support for the Lunar Lake processor as well as the Xe2 integrated graphics. For the graphics benchmarks in this article i used Mesa 25.2-devel Git for showing the very latest Intel Xe2 integrated graphics performance capabilities.
Like with Arrow Lake on Linux, the Intel Lunar Lake performance has evolved quite a lot on Linux with various fixes and performance optimizations throughout.
