Pushing The Intel Panther Lake CPU Performance Further On Linux
The performance profile with the MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI+ Evo laptop allowed for Panther Lake to rack up more wins against the AMD Ryzen AI competition. This higher power allowance though did come at the expense of power efficiency with those Strix Point laptops tending to enjoy better performance-per-Watt than the MSI laptop in its performance profile. At the balanced defaults, the MSI laptop tended to deliver the best performance-per-Watt of all the laptops tested.
Those wanting to dig through some 300 benchmarks in total for both balanced and performance profiles on the Core Ultra X7 358H against all of the other Linux laptops tested can see the raw data here.
With the 300 benchmarks run, the performance profile of this Intel Panther Lake laptop was at 1.18x the performance of the MSI Prestige 14 at Flip AI+ at its defaults. This is much larger than we typically see switching between the ACPI platform profile modes on modern laptops. As noted, Intel typically recommends the balanced mode for these premium Panther Lake laptops to be higher than what it was for this MSI model. That 1.18x performance with the performance profile allowed the Core Ultra X7 358H to come out ahead of the AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 and Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 on a geo mean basis. The performance profile let the generational gains over Lunar Lake expand to 1.62x that of the Core Ultra 7 258V in the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 laptop.
For those still using an Intel Ice Lake or Tiger Lake era laptop, switching to a Panther Lake laptop can achieve more than twice the performance now as shown by these benchmarks. Especially over on the graphics side is much greater iGPU potential too with Arc B390 graphics performing very well on Linux.
For the CPU power consumption over the course of all the benchmarks run, the default balanced mode of this MSI laptop for the Core Ultra X7 358H was at 15 Watts with a peak of 64 Watts. In the performance profile the average jumped to 25.6 Watts with the same peak at 64 Watts. This was higher than the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 average power consumption of 19 Watts and a 33 Watt peak with that ASUS Zenbook.
For those wondering more about the balance defaults versus performance mode impact, I ran some additional benchmarks while engaging additional sensors during the tests to better compare the impact on the MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI D3MTG MS-14T2. In addition I also ran in the power / power-savings profile too for comparison on the vitals between these different platform profiles.
When looking at the peak CPU frequency observed for the Core Ultra X7 358H across these different modes, the out-of-the-box balanced mode never exceeded 4.3GHz on this laptop. The Core Ultra X7 358H is rated for a 4.8GHz max turbo frequency. Only when engaging the non-default performance profile was this Panther Lake SoC actually hitting 4.8GHz for the peak frequency. In general though for both balanced and performance modes the Core Ultra X7 358H was having an average peak frequency among its cores of around 3.2GHz. Meanwhile if trying to extend the battery life, in the power profile it was a 1.5GHz average and peaked at 2.4GHz on any of the cores.
In that power profile, the Core Ultra X7 358H on average was consuming 7.9 Watts with a peak of 20 Watts in these extra benchmarks.
The MSI Prestige 14 Flip AI D3MTG MS-14T2 does run warm. Even in the balanced profile was an 88 degree average core temperature while both peaked to 98 degrees. Only in the power profile was it a modest 53 degrees and a peak of 71 degrees.
The platform profiles did have an impact on other component temperatures too like the NVMe SSD temperature in the different platform profile configurations.
That's the latest on my Intel Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" Linux benchmarking expedition. More Intel Panther Lake benchmarks on Phoronix next week, including Windows vs. Linux benchmarks. Thanks to Intel for supplying this laptop for Panther Lake Linux testing on Phoronix.
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