With the Linux 7.0 merge window beginning to calm down ahead of the 7.0-rc1 release due out on Sunday, one of the areas I was most excited about benchmarking on Linux 7.0 was looking for any performance gains with the new Intel Core Ultra Series 3 “Panther Lake” given ongoing Intel Xe graphics driver improvements and other general kernel optimizations. Unfortunately, at large the Intel Panther Lake performance is moving in the wrong direction with the early Linux 7.0 benchmarking.
I was eager to begin Linux 7.0 kernel testing to look out for any CPU or iGPU performance improvements with the Core Ultra X7 358H and its Arc B390 Graphics. Especially with the Intel Xe driver continuing to mature for the new Xe3 graphics I was hopeful of seeing some improvements for the exciting B390 graphics but overall the performance was regressing over Linux 6.19 stable.
Using the same MSI Prestige 14 Panther Lake laptop (in its “performance” platform profile consistently as recommended by Intel) with the Core Ultra X7 358H and 32GB of LPDDR5-8533 memory, I ran benchmarks on Linux 6.19 stable and Linux 7.0 Git as of 16 February. The same compiler toolchain on that laptop and the same basic kernel configuration (all new Kconfig additions in v7.0 at their default values). No other software changes were made to this laptop besides swapping out the kernel and repeating the benchmark in the otherwise same hardware/software environment.
Here’s what I am seeing so far out of Linux 7.0 on Intel Panther Lake. Benchmarks on other systems are running at the moment to see if these are Panther Lake specific issues or early Linux 7.0 performance regressions at large, so stay tuned for more of these Linux 7.0 performance benchmarks in the coming days and with the merge window wrapping up on Sunday.
