Intel’s 14th Gen mobile processors, marketed as the Core Ultra CPUs are supposed to be the most power-efficient chips. While that may be true, Meteor Lake looks relatively meek in the performance department. Last month, it was reported that Intel’s 14th Gen Core Ultra lineup offers “no appreciable” performance uplift over Raptor Lake, forcing OEMs to lean on AI for marketing.
Moore’s Law is Dead is back with more data on Meteor Lake, highlighting its weaknesses and strengths. Today’s benchmark is Cinebench R23, tested across a wide range of TDPs from 50W to 160W. What we see is that the Core Ultra 9 CPU (6P +8E) offers a decent performance uplift under 100W (10-15%) but tumbles at higher power limits. At 120W and higher, the equivalent 13th Gen Raptor Lake beats the Meteor Lake CPU by over 10%.
The 1st Gen Core Ultra processors leverage the 4nm-class Intel 4 node for the CPU tile. Being an immature node, it likely limits the core clocks of the otherwise unchanged core architectures. The result is that beyond a certain point, the Redwood Cove cores fail to scale in frequency (regardless of the power limit). Meanwhile, Raptor Lake clocks as high as 6GHz with the required power and voltage.
Meteor Lake’s AI performance isn’t looking exceptional either. Sources close to MLID claim that the CPU on the Core Ultra chips has a throughput of just 10 TOPs. In comparison, AMD’s Ryzen 8040 processors offer 16 TOPs of NPU performance despite being a simple refresh. We’ll have to wait and see how this plays out, but things aren’t looking too hot for Intel.
