Earlier this week I published the first Linux benchmarks of Intel’s much anticipated Panther Lake with the Core Ultra X7 358H 16-core 18A processor. The Panther Lake SoC showed very nice generational gains especially with much better performance-per-Watt and the Intel Arc B390 graphics are also fascinatingly fast while continuing to be backed by open-source drivers. In today’s article are more Panther Lake Linux benchmarks on the CPU side in looking at the performance potential when pushing the Core Ultra X7 358H with a higher power budget via the “performance” platform profile.
As noted in yesterday’s Arc B390 graphics benchmarking, the MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI+ Evo used for this benchmarking ends up having a default (balanced mode) power limit that is lower than what Intel recommends for this class of laptops. Intel expects most laptops in this segment to have a higher PL1 minimum value with their out-of-the-box balanced mode albeit this MSI laptop is just 15 Watts. But even with that limit, as shown in the prior CPU benchmarks is some pretty nice performance and excellent power efficiency for our first foray with Panther Lake on Linux. Today’s article though has the CPU results when running this laptop in the performance mode.
The default balanced power profile for this MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI+ Evo is with a 15 Watt PL1 min and 30 Watt PL1 max and a 64 Watt PL2. With the performance mode it’s a 30 Watt PL1 Min, 45 Watt PL1 Max, and 64 Watt PL2. The Core Ultra X7 358H as a reminder has 4 P cores, 8 E cores, and 4 LPE cores while having an engineered base power of 25 Watts and a maximum turbo power of 80 Watts.
With the benchmarks today it’s building on the earlier Core Ultra X7 358H Linux CPU benchmarks in the default (balanced profile) mode with the performance profile mode after applying the Intel Thermald workaround. This shows more what the Core Ultra X7 358H is capable of when not restricted to MSI’s low default power thresholds. As with the prior tests, in addition to the raw CPU performance the SoC power consumption is also monitored for comparing the performance-per-Watt too for each workload.
– Core i7 1165G7 – Dell XPS 13 9310
– Core i7 1185G7 – Dell XPS 13 9310
– Core i7 1280P – MSI Prestige 14Evo
– Core i5 1334U – Framework 12
– Core Ultra 7 155H – Acer Swift 14
– Core Ultra 7 256V – Zenbook S14
– Core Ultra 7 258V – ThinkPad X1 Carbon G13
– Core Ultra X7 358H – MSI Prestige 14
– Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U – ThinkPad X13 G3
– Ryzen 7 7840U – Acer Swift SFE16-43
– Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U – ThinkPad P14s G4
– Ryzen AI 5 340 – HP OmniBook 5
– Ryzen AI 9 365 – Zenbook S16
– Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 – Zenbook S16
All of these laptops were tested on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS snapshot. With Panther Lake you’ll ideally want to be using Linux 6.19 at least for this MSI Prestige 14 laptop for having working WiFi and sound and overall the best driver support. This comparison was limited by the laptops I had available for re-testing under the up-to-date Linux stack, with unfortunately having no Ryzen AI Max (Strix Halo) laptop review hardware around any longer for re-testing to show the peak performance potential on the AMD side this generation.
