Chipzilla’s laptop part has managed a backwards step.
Intel’s Core Ultra 7 155H “Meteor Lake” just got a nasty reminder that “progress” on Linux is not guaranteed.
Phoronix reran its launch tests on the same Acer Swift Go 14 it bought at release, checking what two years of kernel, compiler and driver churn did to performance ahead of Panther Lake laptop noise at CES 2026.
The December 2023 baseline used Ubuntu 23.10, Linux 6.7 and Mesa 24.0-devel graphics drivers via the Oibaf PPA. The end-of-2025 retest moved to an Ubuntu 26.04 daily build with Linux 6.18, GCC 15.2 and Mesa 25.2.
Phoronix kept the comparison honest by sticking to 215 benchmarks that still build and run cleanly on the newer stack. That should have been the easy part.
Instead, the numbers slid. The geometric mean landed at about 93 per cent of the original result, and 151 out of 215 tests ran faster at launch than they do now.
Power draw was reported as roughly similar between the two runs, so there is no obvious efficiency payoff to soften the blow. Chipzilla managed the rare trick of losing speed without gaining much else.
Phoronix’s wider end-of-year coverage contrast looks even worse for Chipzilla. It cited an eight per cent gain for AMD Kracken Point over six months, about a six per cent geo-mean improvement for Chipzilla Lunar Lake in 2025, and around five per cent for AMD Strix Point since launch as of October.
Desktop numbers were kinder to Chipzilla, with Core Ultra 9 285K “Arrow Lake” reportedly up about nine per cent in 2025 while using less power. The “Meteor Lake” laptop did not receive the same treatment.
One likely culprit raised was Chipzilla’s Branch History Injection mitigation, which can bite workloads in ways users will only notice when the benchmarks do the shouting. Phoronix noted that Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite had a disappointing 2025 on Linux as well, with earlier gains fading after later updates.
Qualcomm is still 100 per cent focused on Windows on ARM, so Linux ends up eating whatever falls off the table.
