Benchmarking 18 Years Of Intel Laptop CPUs: Panther Lake As Much As 95x The Speed Of Penryn
It was fun to benchmark all of these old laptops on a modern Linux stack to compare to Panther Lake, but I'm glad it's over as it was quite a lengthy process albeit fascinating.
Those wanting to go through all 150+ benchmarks in total can do so via this result file for all these Intel-powered laptops tested on the Ubuntu 26.04 development builds.
When taking the geometric mean of the benchmarks, going from the Core 2 Duo Penryn to Core Ultra X7 Panther Lake was 21.5x the performance! Or from Sandy Bridge to Panther Lake tested was nearly 10x the performance. (The geo mean was limited to the performance benchmarks that ran successfully across all tested laptops.)
At the most extreme was the OpenSSL performance at 95x the speed with Panther Lake over the Core 2 Duo Penryn followed by OpenVINO AI at 93.9x the performance.
As noted there aren't CPU power numbers for Clarksfield or Penryn due to the lack of CPU power sensor support, but here is all the accumulated CPU power data in total from Sandy Bridge to Panther Lake.
👁 Intel oldest to newest laptop badges
So for those curious how far the Intel laptop performance has evolved over the past 18 years, hopefully you found all of this data insightful to help quantify the gains made over time. It was also fascinating to see these old Core 2 Duo and pre-SandyBridge laptops still being able to run on Ubuntu 26.04 in its current development state thanks to the upstream Intel open-source driver support.
Thanks to Intel for having supplied the Core Ultra X7 358H MSI Prestige 14 AI laptop for all of this ongoing Panther Lake Linux testing at Phoronix. Intel had also supplied the Sandy Bridge laptop back in the day for testing. Plus the Framework 12 was provided by Framework Computer. I believe all the other laptops featured were models I picked up over the years at Phoronix for being able to deliver Linux benchmarks of the new hardware at the time... Since it's only been a more recent trend of the major vendors becoming more interested in Linux on laptops in terms of review/marketing support. If you appreciate all of the Linux testing at Phoronix each and every day of the year, please consider showing your support by joining Phoronix Premium.
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