Intel Meteor Lake On Linux Two Years Post-Launch: 93% The Original Performance
Performance wins on this latest 2025 software stack for Meteor Lake were rare.
Considering the Linux performance improvements recently noted for Intel Lunar Lake in 2025 on Linux and other competing AMD Ryzen AI laptops also showing nice gains this year on Ubuntu Linux, finding Meteor Lake overall performing the same or slower than at launch two years ago was surprising.
In 151 out of 215 benchmarks I conducted then and now, the launch performance was faster than it is now.
When taking the geo mean of all those CPU and GPU benchmarks in full, this end-of-year 2025 Linux software stack saw the performance at roughly 93% of where it was in December 2023 when originally buying this Acer Swift Go 14 laptop on Meteor Lake's launch day. And at roughly the same SoC power consumption so not netting any performance efficiency gains either.
Besides other Intel/AMD laptop hardware enjoying nice improvements in 2025, on the desktop side, recent Phoronix benchmarks also showed the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K Arrow Lake going up by 9% this year while enjoying lower power use too.
With all of the upstream Linux kernel improvements over the past two years especially around the scheduler and other areas, plus the recent benchmarks on other hardware, these Meteor Lake results were surprising and disappointing to see them going in the wrong direction overall. In some tests there were modest improvements over launch day but overall flat or slower. One possible contributor to the slower performance is Branch History Injection "BHI" as one of the CPU exploits coming about in the past two years and applying to Meteor Lake. There is the BHI_DIS_S mitigation by default for Meteor Lake since that point and was expected to contain some performance overhead but I hadn't looked at the BHI performance impact specifically previously -- perhaps it was more than anticipated but can be the subject of a follow-up article in the new year.
For what it's worth, Intel Meteor Lake isn't the only laptop generation out there to have a rough 2025 under Linux... Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite on Linux ended 2025 disappointing.
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