Intel Meteor Lake Core Ultra 7 155H performance falls in line with current-gen Raptor Lake mobile chips in leaked Cinebench R20 result

After much speculation and many leaks, Intel finally unveiled the Meteor Lake CPUs for notebooks. The processors are designed to prioritize efficiency over raw performance while also bringing essential upgrades like a new iGPU and AI enhancements. However, we have no idea how the Meteor Lake processors actually perform since consumer notebooks with the new CPUs are still months away. Thankfully, Moore’s Law Is Dead has now leaked the Cinebench R20 score of the Meteor Lake Core Ultra 7 155H CPU, a chip that should occupy the middle of the enthusiast MTL lineup with Core Ultra 5 chips below it and Core Ultra 9 processors above it.

Per MLID, a non-retail Core Ultra 7 155H with 6 P-cores and 8 E-cores scored around 7,300 points in the Cinebench R20 multi-core benchmark while running at 100 W. As a comparison, the 14-core 13th gen chips like the Core i7-13700H and the Core i9-13900H score 5,971 and 6,781 points, on average, in the same benchmark per our testing. So, the Core Ultra 7 155H’s performance is nothing impressive, especially when we consider that the scores for the above-mentioned Raptor Lake CPUs are the averages and not from the top-performing laptops. For instance, the Core i7-13700H went up to 7,674 points in the MSI Stealth 16 Studio, while the Core i9-13900H reached up to 7,716 points in the MSI Stealth 17 Studio.

MLID further elaborates that, according to his source, although the Core Ultra 7 155H under discussion was a “Pre-QS” chip, the final performance should only be around 5% faster. The source also suggested that the Core Ultra 9 185H should boost performance by another 5% over the Core Ultra 7 155H.

Additionally, the source alleged that the Ultra 7 155H sample was “close to final performance” as it was “running at 100W with Desktop Cooling”. The CPU reportedly sustained 3.8 GHz in the Cinebench R20 test while shooting to 4.8 GHz “just like the spec calls for”.

Interestingly, the same source maintained that the 2 extra little cores that Intel packs inside the SoC in Meteor Lake processors are never utilized to enhance multi-threaded performance “unless you manually make them”. The same thing was confirmed by another source who claimed that while it is “physically possible” to use all 16 cores (6 P-cores + 8 E-cores + 2 SoC cores) to run an app, the SoC cores are not really designed for these workloads since they are “clocked lower, are tweaked for density and low voltage, and are on an inferior 6 nm process”.

Finally, MLID reports that Intel is on track to release the Arrow Lake processors in Q3/4 2024. The leaker further suggests that we could see Meteor Lake-based NUCs and even Core i5/i7 chips launch for the LGA 1851 platform before ARL releases.

All in all, it seems that Intel’s primary focus with the Meteor Lake processors is ensuring efficiency. So while we could see a healthy performance boost, it is reasonable to expect a small performance improvement but a large efficiency gain.

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