Intel Core Ultra 7 256V "Lunar Lake" Linux Performance In Mid-2025 vs. Launch Day
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.
👁 ASUS Zenbook S14 with Lunar Lake Core Ultra 7
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.
👁 Intel Lunar Lake on Ubuntu Linux
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.