Intel Core Ultra 7 155H

The Intel Core Ultra 7 155H is a high-end laptop processor of the Meteor Lake series that has 16 cores (6 + 8 + 2) and 22 threads at its disposal. This 1st Gen Core Ultra chip has come to replace 13th generation Core chips; its 16 cores are comprised of 6 HT-enabled Performance cores running at up to 4.8 GHz and 10 Efficient cores (8 main cores plus 2 extra ones found in the Low Power Island) running at up to 3.8 GHz.

The 8-core Arc GPU, just out of the oven, serves as the integrated graphics adapter - this runs at up to 2.30 GHz - and there is a bevy of other brand-new technologies on offer as well, including the integrated AI Boost NPU with two Gen 3 engines for hardware AI workload acceleration.

Architecture & Features

Meteor Lake is a case of throwing everything at AMD (including the kitchen sink, yes) and seeing what sticks. With this product family, Intel intends to deliver higher CPU performance, higher GPU performance, higher hardware AI workload acceleration rates and longer battery life than what Raptor Lake chips were capable of. For those counting, that's four birds to kill with a single stone.

This generation of Intel Core processors features Redwood architecture P-cores and Crestwood architecture E-cores. Both come with slight architectural improvements over Raptor Cove and Gracemont respectively for slightly higher performance-per-clock figures; the interesting thing is that of the 10 E-cores, two are actually a separate cluster located on what Intel calls a "Low Power Island". Essentially, the latter is an SoC within an SoC that can stay active while most other parts of the chip are temporarily switched off to save power. The low-power E-cores run at up to 2.5 GHz. Intel hopes this approach will let it deliver unprecedentedly low power consumption figures when under low load, boosting battery life of laptops and tablets powered by Meteor Lake.

To build its Meteor Lake processors, Intel uses the Foveros technology (stacking several chips on top of each other). This is a cost-cutting measure more than anything else, as manufacturing several small dies on several different processes is so much cheaper than making a huge single die and hoping that there are no defects in it that will require disabling some parts of it.

Elsewhere, the Core Ultra 7 155H comes with 24 MB of L3 cache and a very healthy number of PCIe 5 and PCIe 4 lanes for NVMe SSD speeds up to 15.7 GB/s. It supports RAM running at up to 7467 MHz (DDR5-5600, LPDDR5-7467, LPDDR5x-7467, to be specific - which is about as good as what 8040 series Ryzen chips have). Naturally, the chip features built-in Thunderbolt 4 support and Intel CNVi Wi-Fi support; fascinatingly enough, Intel chose to keep native SATA III support that AMD had removed from its Ryzen processors quite a while ago.

The 155H is compatible with 64-bit Windows 10, 64-bit Windows 11 and with many Linux distros.

Performance

If one chooses to trust the official performance data published by Intel, then the 155H is about as fast as the Ryzen 9 6900HX (Zen 3 Plus, 8 cores, 16 threads, up to 4.9 GHz), as far as multi-thread performance is concerned. This isn't a ground-breaking result but let's just wait for our in-house testing results instead of jumping to conclusions.

Either way, real-world performance of the chip may vary significantly depending on how high the CPU power limits are and how competent the cooling solution of the system is.

Graphics

The 8-core Arc GPU running at up to 2.30 GHz is slated to be a proper alternative to the mighty Radeon 780M. The thing is almost as fast as the GTX 1650 (Laptop) and the RTX 2050 (Laptop) to represent some seriously solid performance gains over aging Xe-series integrated GPUs. If one chooses to take Intel's word for it, that is.

A proper DX12 Ultimate graphics adapter, the Arc is no stranger to ray tracing and other modern technologies including AI frame generation (XeSS). It will let you connect up to four SUHD 4320p monitors and it will both HW-encode and HW-encode the most widely used video codecs including AVC, HEVC and AV1 in a fast and efficient manner.

Your mileage may vary depending on how high the CPU power limits are, how competent the cooling solution of your system is, how fast the RAM of your system is. The latter is really important; Intel stresses that for the Arc to deliver the best results possible, multi-channel RAM configuration is a must.

Power consumption

This mighty Core Ultra 7 series processor has a Base power consumption of 28 W, while its Turbo power consumption is not supposed to exceed 115 W. Its Base power consumption is supposed to be around 64 W, however, most laptop makers will probably go for a higher value to get higher clock speeds and thus better performance. Either way, a powerful cooling solution will be needed to sort out this chip's hot temper.

The 155H is comprised of five small chips ("tiles") that are connected using Intel's Foveros technology. The tile containing main CPU cores is produced on the fairly modern 7 nm Intel process marketed as Intel 4 while most other tiles (the iGPU, the I/O die, ...) are built with TSMC's N5 and N6 processes. The base tile is built with the old Intel 22FFL process.

Series	Intel Intel Meteor Lake-H
Codename	Meteor Lake-H
Series: Intel Meteor Lake-H Meteor Lake-H Intel Core Ultra 9 185H 3.8 - 5.1 GHz 16 / 22  24 MB L3 Intel Core Ultra 7 165H 3.8 - 5 GHz 16 / 22  24 MB L3 Intel Core Ultra 7 155H « 3.8 - 4.8 GHz 16 / 22  24 MB L3 Intel Core Ultra 5 135H 3.6 - 4.6 GHz 14 / 18  18 MB L3 Intel Core Ultra 5 125H 3.6 - 4.5 GHz 14 / 18  18 MB L3
Clock Rate	3800 - 4800 MHz
Level 3 Cache	24 MB
Number of Cores / Threads	16 / 22 6 x 4.8 GHz Intel Redwood Cove P-Core 8 x 3.8 GHz Intel Crestmont E-Core 2 x 2.5 GHz Intel Crestmont E-Core
Power Consumption (TDP = Thermal Design Power)	28 Watt
Manufacturing Technology	7 nm
Max. Temperature	110 °C
Socket	BGA2049
Features	DDR5-5600/LPDDR5-7467/LPDDR5x-7467 RAM, PCIe 5, Thr. Director, DL Boost, AI Boost, vPro Ess., MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE4.1, SSE4.2, AES, AVX, AVX2, AVX-VNNI, FMA3, SHA
GPU	Intel Arc 8-Cores iGPU ( - 2250 MHz)
64 Bit	64 Bit support
Architecture	x86
Announcement Date	12/14/2023
Product Link (external)	ark.intel.com

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