Dell 16 Premium CPU runs 15 to 20 percent faster than on the XPS 16 9640, but there's a catch

The Dell 16 Premium is now shipping worldwide to succeed last year's XPS 16 9640. It replaces the Meteor Lake-H and Ada Lovelace options on the 2024 model with Arrow Lake-H and Blackwell options, respectively. Users can expect up to 20 percent faster multi-thread performance over the previous generation XPS 16 9640 Core Ultra 7 155H if configuring with the Core Ultra 7 255H.

The catch, however, is that the 20 percent boost is limited to just the first few minutes or so. As shown by our graph below, performance scores would steadily decrease from 3410 points to ~2900 points over time when running CineBench R15 xT in a loop on our Dell 16 Premium Core Ultra 7 255H test unit. In comparison, the XPS 16 9640 would remain steadier over time. The CPU performance delta between the Dell 16 Premium and XPS 16 9640 becomes narrower as throttling begins to kick in.

Most users will likely not even notice the slight increases or decreases in CPU performance between the two laptops which makes the older XPS 16 9640 seem like the better deal. Nonetheless, it illustrates the relatively minor gains and differences between the 2024 and 2025 models. The 2024 XPS 16 was already a huge tangent over the 2023 XPS 16 and so users shouldn't expect too much more out of the latest 2025 version. More benchmarks and comparisons can be found on our review of the 2025 model here.