The Intel Core Ultra 7 155H Review: Meteor Lake Marks A Fresh Start To Mobile CPUs
by Gavin Bonshor on April 11, 2024 8:30 AM ESTASUS Zenbook 14 OLED UX3405MA: Rendering & Simulation Performance
Rendering tests are often a little more simple to digest and automate than others. All the tests give out some sort of score or time, usually in an obtainable way that makes it fairly easy to extract. These tests are some of the most strenuous in our list due to the highly threaded nature of rendering and ray-tracing, and they can draw a lot of power. Power isn't so much a problem on mobile platforms, but rendering performance and how it relates to varied workloads such as video editing, is still a vital part of overall performance.
Different from rendering, in our Simulation section, these tests act more like synthetic benchmarks but, at some level, are still trying to simulate a given environment.
For this review, we have included the AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS, which includes the same Radeon 780M integrated graphics, along with the Ryzen 5 8600G, which uses the AMD Phoenix mobile architecture but is adopted for desktops. This allows us to show more data points for our review of Intel's Meteor Lake-based Core Ultra 7 155H to see where performance lies.
Despite including AMD's Phoenix-based Ryzen 8000G APUs in our results, as we expand our list of notebooks tested, we'll have more effective and comparable data points in the future. To add more reference, all of the chips have been tested with Windows 11 22H2.
Rendering
As we can see from our rendering results, the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H is quite competitive in single-threaded performance and is a little behind AMD's Zen 4 mobile Phoenix-based Ryzen 9 7940HS. The situation changes somewhat when we move to multi-threaded performance, with the Meteor Lake notebooks lagging behind in all Blender 3.6 tests. Things look better in our POV-Ray test, with a competitive showing, and there is a similar situation in the V-Ray benchmark.
Simulation
Our simulation benchmarks show that the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H outperforms the Ryzen 9 7940HS and even the desktop Ryzen 8000G series processors in Dwarf Fortress. In our Factorio tests, Meteor Lake is also very competitive with the AMD Phoenix-based chips, although the AMD chips perform better in the 3D Mark CPU profile with maximum threads.
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jeenam - Friday, April 12, 2024 - link
I've been an anandtech reader since 1998 or so and I'm not here to pick a bone. I'm a fan, and hope AT lives on. But did a quick search and the only two major websites with GPU reviews that referenced Returnal or Company of Heroes were Hot Hardware and Ars Technica. An expanded test suite of games might have been more appropriate because it's likely the ARC GPU would have been handily beaten across the board. Replysjkpublic@gmail.com - Thursday, April 11, 2024 - link
Strange. Some of the tests list the 155H as 28W with test results. This is misleading as the SoC uses much more power doing the test. ReplyGavin Bonshor - Friday, April 12, 2024 - link
When we review CPUs, especially when highlighting them in the charts, we list the base TDP, as every motherboard has its own interpretation of what level of power it will push through the chip (Multi-core enhancement). ReplyCarmen00 - Friday, April 12, 2024 - link
Yet in another comment, we have Ryan Smith saying "With these integrated devices, we're reviewing the notebook as much as we're reviewing the chip inside."So if you're doing what he says—post the right numbers, because that's what you're doing. And if you're NOT doing what he says, then don't post useless stuff that seems, to my (perhaps overly-critical eye) to exist so that the article can claim that Intel is scoring SOME kind of a win, when the graphs really don't seem to show a heck of a lot of CPU-related win.
I'm fine with either, let me be honest. But I want to see some consistency, that is all. Reply
Ryan Smith - Friday, April 12, 2024 - link
I'm all for trying to make sure you guys get the data that you want to see. But not sure I follow here. We are being consistent in our testing methodology, and taking care to be explicit in that our test systems don't have identical TDPs.https://images.anandtech.com/doci/21282/Core%20Ult...
In a laptop, sustained TDPs are our primary concern, as these devices cannot turbo multiple cores for more than a few seconds. So this is what we're noting in an article like this, to illustrate how we aren't testing devices with matching TDPs. Reply
ballsystemlord - Friday, April 12, 2024 - link
I agree with Ryan here, sustained performance is what you should be looking at. Anything can turbo to infinity.The only real use case for turbo, would be application start-up. But even then, you'd have to be waking the PC from idle and selecting the application in record time for it to matter at all. Reply
lmcd - Wednesday, April 17, 2024 - link
The problem I'm seeing is that this article takes the format of previous laptop reviews but not the depth (in part due to the declining access this publication), and the headline could better fit the contents. It could even be something silly like "The Intel Core Ultra 7 155H Review: Meteor Lake starts with a Moment of Zen(Book)" and be more valuable to the reader.It also did not feel like we really got (even a rehash of) an overview of Meteor Lake as a platform. So to me, this was an ASUS Zenbook review. Framing this as "ASUS ZenBook 14 OLED: A Meteor Lake Thin&Light Review" also better captures its content. Reply
eastcoast_pete - Friday, April 12, 2024 - link
I am not surprised that the Core 7 Meteor Lake isn't beating the Ryzen 7840HS in compute or graphics - that particular Ryzen 4 monolith is (IMHO) currently AMD's best foot forward, and a great APU. However, Intel did do its homework when it comes to the intended use of Meteor Lake SoCs: mobile, especially light and ultralight laptops and 2-in-1s. I don't expect a ~ 1 kg notebook to do that much higher level gaming or compute. I do expect long runtime on battery, fluid use of office and other productivity apps, and otherwise decent performance (speed). Again, AMD's Phoenix/Hawk APUs are, right now, the most performant solutions in that class, but it's good news for all of us that Intel has closed the gap. It'll mean that AMD will have to keep evolving its APUs, and maybe do a better job making them broadly available with good drivers within a few months of announcing them. Because that was not the case with Phoenix, which just took too long to be ready for prime time, and left the opening for Intel to move back into.Lastly, I find that one of the most remarkable things about Meteor Lake is that Intel got its tile design and packaging working quite well. Being able to combine different chips from different fabs (Intel and TSMC) and nodes into a cohesive unit without incurring large hits on performance and efficiency is big step forward. Reply
nandnandnand - Saturday, April 13, 2024 - link
Lunar Lake will be the one to watch. It's Meteor Lake-U evolved (4+4 instead of 2+8, on-package memory by default, decent graphics). Low power mobile chips are more interesting than the 45W+ ones. Replymode_13h - Monday, April 15, 2024 - link
> Being able to combine different chips from different fabs (Intel and TSMC)> and nodes into a cohesive unit without incurring large hits on performance
> and efficiency is big step forward.
AMD combined chiplets from both TSMC and Global Foundries in the same CPU, all the way back in Zen 2! If you count HBM, they combined chiplets from different foundries as far back as their HD Fury GPUs.
As for performance and efficiency, I find Meteor Lake underwhelming on both fronts. Idle performance and things like video playback gain a benefit from the new SoC architecture, but when it comes to compute-intensive tasks, we see why Intel kept around Raptor Lake for the performance-oriented segment. Reply