As part of the various end-of-year annual benchmarking comparisons and the like on Phoronix, today is a look at how the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H “Meteor Lake” performance has evolved under Ubuntu Linux in the two years since launching. Plus with next-gen Intel Panther Lake laptops expected to be showcased next week at CES, it’s a good time for revisiting the Meteor Lake performance to see the difference two years have made for Intel Meteor Lake laptops on Linux.
It was back in December 2023 when Intel launched Meteor Lake with big improvements over Alder Lake. For being able to deliver Linux benchmarks of Meteor Lake, I bought an Acer Swift Go 14 laptop with Core Ultra 7 155H. That continues to be my Intel Meteor Lake test system for Linux with having not received any review samples from Intel or partners. With that same exact laptop, I loaded up an Ubuntu 26.04 development snapshot to see how the Linux performance is looking compared to the same launch-day benchmarks shown two years ago to the month.
With other end-of-year 2025 benchmarking I have foudn AMD Krackan Point improved 8% over the past six months, Lunar Lake achieved around a 6% geo mean improvement this year, and AMD Strix Point improved by around 5% since launch as of October. Intel Arrow Lake on the desktop delivered better performance and lower power use on Linux in 2025 too as shown in Phoronix benchmarks last month. So I was quite curious to see the improvement for Intel Meteor Lake over the past two years since its December 2023 debut and buying this Acer Swift Go 14 retail laptop.
Unfortunately, the performance ended up moving in the wrong direction. Loading the latest Ubuntu Linux state up on this Core Ultra 7 155H laptop actually yielded worse performance than on launch day. On a geo mean basis for over 200 benchmarks then versus now, Linux at the end of 2025 is just at 93% the original performance in those benchmarks. That’s rather rare with typically seeing Linux performance evolve nicely on Linux for modern Intel/AMD laptops during their first few years. As noted, Intel Lunar Lake saw some nice improvements over the past year as did the AMD Ryzen AI laptops too while Meteor Lake worked backwards.
Back in December 2023 for testing Meteor Lake on Linux when buying the Acer Swift Go 14 was using Ubuntu 23.10 with the Linux 6.7 upstream kernel, Mesa 24.0-devel graphics drivers from the Oibaf PPA, and other up-to-date components at the time of Ubuntu 23.10. Now for EOY2025, Ubuntu 26.04 daily ISO was used with the Linux 6.18 kernel, GCC 15.2 compiler, Mesa 25.2 graphics drivers, and other updated components over the past two years.
Over 200 benchmarks were run that occurred back in December 2023 and would still build and run fine atop the updated software stack with GCC 15, Python 3.13, etc. In addition to looking at how the Meteor Lake performance has shifted over the past two years, the CPU SoC power consumption was also compared to see its impact on the newer Linux software releases.
