Intel Core Ultra 5 125H “Meteor Lake” CPU Loses To AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS At 65W TDP, Arc iGPU Up To 18% Faster Than Radeon 780M

Intel's Core Ultra 5 125H "Meteor Lake" CPU benchmarks have been leaked by Lenovo ahead of launch & lost to the AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS.

As mentioned above, the latest Meteor Lake leak comes directly from Lenovo which has leaked out the performance of the Intel Core Ultra 5 125H CPU. The company compared the chip against two other CPUs, the Core i5-13500H (Raptor Lake) and the Ryzen 7 7840HS (Phoenix). All CPUs were tested at a 65W TDP to make sure that there are no disparities in the power department but still, thermal solutions of specific laptops can affect the final performance. Considering that these benchmarks come from Lenovo, they are likely based on their designs so thermal solutions could be very similar.

Starting with the specifications, the Intel Core Ultra 5 125H CPU is based on the Intel 4 process node and features a 14-core design that comprises 4 P-Cores, 8 E-Cores, and 2 LP E-Cores. The chip has 18 threads, a 3.6 GHz base clock, and a 4.5 GHz boost clock. It carries 20 MB of cache & it will be configured at a 28W TDP. The CPU also houses the Intel Arc Xe-LPG integrated graphics with 7 Xe-Cores.

Coming to the performance benchmarks, the Intel Core Ultra 5 125H "Meteor Lake" CPU was just slightly faster than the Core i5-13500H but it lost to AMD's Ryzen 7 7840HS 8-Core CPU in all of the multi-test benchmarks.

Lenovo claims that the 65W TDP design on their laptops can deliver up to 47.1% performance boost in benchmarks such as Cinebench R23 however the max difference in-between the 28W & 65W designs is an uplift of around 30% for the CPU and 15% for the GPU. The company also states that these results were carried on a Yoga Pro AI 2024 laptop.

The only area where the Meteor Lake CPU had a lead was the graphics department where it ended up to 18% faster than AMD's Radeon 780M (RDNA 3) iGPU which is a huge boost. The lead was smaller in the FireStrike benchmark which is based on the older DX11 API but Time Spy which utilizes the modern DX12 API ended up much faster.

Note: Data compiled from 3DMark official results database.

This means that we can expect strong iGPU performance out of Meteor Lake chips which will be great for laptops as they won't have to rely on entry-level discrete GPUs, saving up both costs and battery life. The Arc Xe-LPG 7-core GPU at 65W also ends up faster than the 8-core variant at 28W so we can expect to see some fast Mini PCs and handhelds that utilize higher TDP Core Ultra CPUs in the future.

The benchmarks don't include battery testing and thermal performance which are very important metrics to consider when buying a laptop. Based on what we have seen earlier, it looks like those may not be that great but with the launch just two days away, we will know for sure how well Intel Meteor Lake "Core Ultra" CPUs perform in real-life workloads including apps and games.

News Sources: Tieba Baidu, HXL