Keep in mind that they're different workloads with different versions of Blender. The version in SPEC2017 is from 7 years ago, which was the Blender 2.7 era.
spec2017 is using an old version of Blender that's frozen in time. That's needed to make all spec2017 results comparable with each other.
In the individual Rendering benchmarks, Gavin used a reasonably current version of Blender (3.6 is a LTS release from June 27, 2023), probably also built with a different compiler.
Why is the text seemingly out of line with the actual results? Repeatedly it is describing wins for the U7 155H that don't seem to be backed up in the actual benchmarks. For example:
"As we can see from our rendering results, the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H is very competitive in single-threaded performance and is ahead of AMD's Zen 4 mobile Phoenix-based Ryzen 9 7940HS."
Actually, the graphs don't show a single instance of the Ultra 7155H besting the Ryzen 9 7940HS in ALL of the preceding graphs.
"Looking at performance in our web and office-based testing, in the UL Procyon Office-based tests using Microsoft Office, the Core Ultra 7 155H is actually outperforming the AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS, which is a good win in itself."
How is 6,792 greater than 7,482? How is 6,978 higher than 7,162?
Did the benchmarks get updated after the text was written? Did someone write the summary text and not pay attention to "Higher is better" vs "Lower is better"?
The text describing the Spec tests are also incorrect.
"Even though the Core Ultra 7 155H is technically an SoC, it remains competitive in the SPECint2017 section of our single-thread testing against the Ryzen 9 7940HS. The AMD chip performs better in two of the tests (525.x264_r and 548.exchange2_r); on the whole, Intel is competitive."
Except the graph shows the AMD system beating the Intel system in 7 tests and only losing by a small margin in 3 of them. The AMD system even beats the Intel desktop system in 4 tests and ties it in 1.
"In the second section of our single-threaded testing, we again see a very competitive showing in SPECfp2017 between the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H and the AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS. The only test we see a major gain for the Ryzen 9 7940HS is in the 503.bwaves_r test, which is a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation."
Except the AMD system wins in 4 tests, essentially ties in 5 tests, and only loses in 2. It even beat the desktop system in 3 tests.
The text is nowhere near consistent with the graphs.
No, something is clearly wrong there. I deal with SPEC a lot for work and that's an abnormally low result unless it was actually being run in rate-1 mode (ie, someone forgot to properly set the number of copies.)
While we're talking about SPEC2017 scores, I'd like to add that I really miss the way your reviews used to feature the overall cumulative SPECfp and SPECint scores. It was useful in comparing overall performance, both of the systems included in your review and those from other reviews.
BTW, I assume there's a "standard" way that SPEC computes those cumulative scores. Might want to look up how they do it, if the benchmark doesn't just compute them for you. If you come up with your own way of combining them, your cumulative scores probably won't be comparable to anyone else's.
Obviously, the cluster topology description is wrong in the core to core latency measturements section, along with the hilarious conclusion the first two E-cores having only 5 ns latency to each other. (First two threads of course belong to a P-core, albeit I have no idea why the core enumeration is apparently 1P-8E-5P-2LPE.)
I wonder if the reason they did it that way is to do with how programs which explicitly set affinity typically do so. The rationale might be something like:
1. Make single-threaded programs and the main thread of multi-threaded programs fast. 2. For multi-threaded programs, the next set of threads should be efficiency-optimized.
So it uses more power and still loses in most things to the AMD chip
wow, I thought intel was getting better and this is all they have? Let alone AMDs newer Zen5 chips are coming soon and will only move their lead further.
well, it definitely isn't using more power, perhaps you skipped over the battery/power section? A lot less power during general office type usage, despite a thinner chassis that can deal with much less thermals etc. But the laptops being compared are so vastly different this whole review seems kinda....meaningless? The razer 14 is a 4lb gaming laptop, with thermals to boot, in a comparatively massive chassis. And it's being compared against a macbook air esque form factor. The reader isn't gaining much from a comparison to another processor that does not exist in a comparable form factor/power envelope.
Ultimately that's down to AMD and Intel. One sampled a 42W notebook for their mobile CPU launch, the other sampled a 28W notebook. We've equalized things as much as we can, but we can only test what we have (or in the case of the MSI, get our hands on).
For those apps which run on both machines, it's absolutely a valid comparison. If all the apps you need are supported on both, then it's useful to see how they compare because you really could pick either one.
It's not uncommon for Intel presentations to have errors. But they also crop up in Ark from time to time as well. So 8 is probably correct, but we should get confirmation just in case.
An entire page, and an entire paragraph in the conclusion, wasted on pointless AI nonsense. Nobody reading this site cares about that rubbish, stop wasting our time.
Also good to see Intel's "revolutionary" new chip pulling the exact same BS as their past chips have regarding power. "28W" that actually uses 65W, incredible.
The only thing your comment tells me is that the AI benchmarks should be updated to include more typical real-world AI usage examples. Aside from things like Stable Diffusion, where most readers are likely to encounter AI in their everyday computing is in apps like video conferencing (background replacement, noise suppression) and photo editing.
Those iGPU numbers are way off - the Socket AM5 8700G is obviously going to outperform the mobile variant across the board, based on TDP alone. Even if the mobile version was using LPDDR5X memory (which in this case it wasn't), it wouldn't be enough to close the gap.
AnandTech: ever given any though to getting all these chips in mini PC form? Most of those allow much more control over the TDP, along with memory/SSD being your own picks. And then that all but eliminates the cooling issues of a laptop.
While you can get a 7940HS miniPC now, Core Ultra miniPCs aren't out yet. Core Ultra laptops are showing up at reviewers just now, but they've barely left the gate in terms of availability to regular consumers.
Asus announced NUC 14 two weeks ago, on Mar 27. They are just now being listed at various retailers, so I would expect them to show up in stock a month or two from now.
My retailer indicates that the Asus Nuc 14Pro+ is available. I would be curious to see how the 155H performs in that chassis with a lot more thermal headroom.
"On the flip side, as we established with our look at power consumption, the Ryzen 9 7940HS laptop is able to sustain a much higher TDP overall – so that memory bandwidth deficit is counterbalanced by a sizable TDP advantage."
Are you really a tech review site ? In this case memory bandwidth is king with TDP a distant second (given comparable compute power). And Intel has a huge advantage with LPDDR5X here that it manages to waste somehow.
Also the official title is CPU review and there are graphs for BATTERY CHARGE TIME ??? Really ? What does that have to do with the CPU at all ?
"Also the official title is CPU review and there are graphs for BATTERY CHARGE TIME ??? Really ? What does that have to do with the CPU at all ?"
With these integrated devices, we're reviewing the notebook as much as we're reviewing the chip inside. And in any case, battery life/recharge testing is very straightforward and is something that can be run overnight, so it doesn't get in the way of other testing.
Sure, but then the title should be "Review of 155H and the ASUS Zenbook 14". If it is a CPU review, then the other tests are irrelevant. If it is a device review, then there are things missing.
Currently it poses as a some kind of strange hybrid while the title says only CPU review. Basically the content does not match the label on the box ...
what's with the trend of removing INS key and replacing it with a camera or power or some other useless button. this is getting ridiculous. i use shift-ins to paste all the time, and there are plenty of times when i want to overwrite something without caring to select it, thus needing an ins toggle. what the hell? is this some new crap mandated by the Microsoft ai button initiative?
From the inconsistencies between benchmark results and the text, to the comparison between latest Intel and previous gen AMD and the article title, this is clearly paid advertising by either Asus or Intel.
Journalism guidelines say paid content should be disclosed, and yet I see it nowhere in the article. Feels like a new low.
"this is clearly paid advertising by either Asus or Intel."
This is not a paid article in any shape or form. We have not received a dime from any party for this review.
To be clear, Intel did supply the Asus laptop for review purposes - as they usually do for mobile-first CPU launches - and we sourced the MSI laptop separately so that we could have a second data point.
The benchmarks don't paint the Intel chip in a positive light. I agree with your assessment. The first thing I checked was the Graphics benchmarks as I recently purchased a 7840HS which has the Radeon 780M iGPU. It would seem Company of Heroes and Returnal were cherry-picked for the GPU benchmarks just so it would appear the integrated Intel ARC GPU isn't a dog compared to the 780M.
Any objective reader who simply went on benchmarks would make the following honest assessment:
- The Intel ARC GPU is a dog compared to the 780M - General benchmark performance indicates the Intel chip getting smoked by Ryzen 4 - The one area where Intel has an advantage is battery life
It's obvious the GPU benchmarks included games that were cherry-picked to give the appearance that the Intel ARC GPU can actually be competitive, when most likely if you were to pick a typical suite of games for benchmarking (e.g. GTA V, RE4 Remake, Forza, CS2, etc.) the losses to the 780M would continue to pile up.
" It would seem Company of Heroes and Returnal were cherry-picked for the GPU benchmarks just so it would appear the integrated Intel ARC GPU isn't a dog compared to the 780M."
To be clear, the benchmarks were picked before we had the hardware. There's a lot of calculus that goes into selecting software for the benchmark suite, but the big things are suitability as a benchmark (i.e. does it even have a benchmark mode), popularity, and performance scalability.
Even then, we kind of whiffed it in the end, as Returnal doesn't break 30fps on current iGPUs.
I've been an anandtech reader since 1998 or so and I'm not here to pick a bone. I'm a fan, and hope AT lives on. But did a quick search and the only two major websites with GPU reviews that referenced Returnal or Company of Heroes were Hot Hardware and Ars Technica. An expanded test suite of games might have been more appropriate because it's likely the ARC GPU would have been handily beaten across the board.
When we review CPUs, especially when highlighting them in the charts, we list the base TDP, as every motherboard has its own interpretation of what level of power it will push through the chip (Multi-core enhancement).
Yet in another comment, we have Ryan Smith saying "With these integrated devices, we're reviewing the notebook as much as we're reviewing the chip inside."
So if you're doing what he says—post the right numbers, because that's what you're doing. And if you're NOT doing what he says, then don't post useless stuff that seems, to my (perhaps overly-critical eye) to exist so that the article can claim that Intel is scoring SOME kind of a win, when the graphs really don't seem to show a heck of a lot of CPU-related win.
I'm fine with either, let me be honest. But I want to see some consistency, that is all.
I'm all for trying to make sure you guys get the data that you want to see. But not sure I follow here. We are being consistent in our testing methodology, and taking care to be explicit in that our test systems don't have identical TDPs.
In a laptop, sustained TDPs are our primary concern, as these devices cannot turbo multiple cores for more than a few seconds. So this is what we're noting in an article like this, to illustrate how we aren't testing devices with matching TDPs.
I agree with Ryan here, sustained performance is what you should be looking at. Anything can turbo to infinity. The only real use case for turbo, would be application start-up. But even then, you'd have to be waking the PC from idle and selecting the application in record time for it to matter at all.
The problem I'm seeing is that this article takes the format of previous laptop reviews but not the depth (in part due to the declining access this publication), and the headline could better fit the contents. It could even be something silly like "The Intel Core Ultra 7 155H Review: Meteor Lake starts with a Moment of Zen(Book)" and be more valuable to the reader.
It also did not feel like we really got (even a rehash of) an overview of Meteor Lake as a platform. So to me, this was an ASUS Zenbook review. Framing this as "ASUS ZenBook 14 OLED: A Meteor Lake Thin&Light Review" also better captures its content.
I am not surprised that the Core 7 Meteor Lake isn't beating the Ryzen 7840HS in compute or graphics - that particular Ryzen 4 monolith is (IMHO) currently AMD's best foot forward, and a great APU. However, Intel did do its homework when it comes to the intended use of Meteor Lake SoCs: mobile, especially light and ultralight laptops and 2-in-1s. I don't expect a ~ 1 kg notebook to do that much higher level gaming or compute. I do expect long runtime on battery, fluid use of office and other productivity apps, and otherwise decent performance (speed). Again, AMD's Phoenix/Hawk APUs are, right now, the most performant solutions in that class, but it's good news for all of us that Intel has closed the gap. It'll mean that AMD will have to keep evolving its APUs, and maybe do a better job making them broadly available with good drivers within a few months of announcing them. Because that was not the case with Phoenix, which just took too long to be ready for prime time, and left the opening for Intel to move back into. Lastly, I find that one of the most remarkable things about Meteor Lake is that Intel got its tile design and packaging working quite well. Being able to combine different chips from different fabs (Intel and TSMC) and nodes into a cohesive unit without incurring large hits on performance and efficiency is big step forward.
Lunar Lake will be the one to watch. It's Meteor Lake-U evolved (4+4 instead of 2+8, on-package memory by default, decent graphics). Low power mobile chips are more interesting than the 45W+ ones.
> Being able to combine different chips from different fabs (Intel and TSMC) > and nodes into a cohesive unit without incurring large hits on performance > and efficiency is big step forward.
AMD combined chiplets from both TSMC and Global Foundries in the same CPU, all the way back in Zen 2! If you count HBM, they combined chiplets from different foundries as far back as their HD Fury GPUs.
As for performance and efficiency, I find Meteor Lake underwhelming on both fronts. Idle performance and things like video playback gain a benefit from the new SoC architecture, but when it comes to compute-intensive tasks, we see why Intel kept around Raptor Lake for the performance-oriented segment.
"Meanwhile AMD does not offer a custom execution backend for this test, so while Windows ML is available as a fallback option to access the CPU and the GPU, it does not have access to AMD's NPU."
So why are there no graph entries for the AMD GPU using Windows ML? You only show CPU results in the graph. Seems a bit disingenuous.
This is really a rather pathetic comparison. YouTubers can get their hands on more devices for comparison than this.
I get it. AnandTech is a dying publication that doesn't have the influence it used to, to get devices. And this also leads to particularly fluffy pieces to appease the few companies that do provide review units.
> Starting with the Redwood Cove (P) core cluster on the Core Ultra 7 155H, we can see that the core-to-core access latencies across the P-cores ranges from 4.5 to 4.9 ns, which is very similar to that of Raptor Lake via the Core i5-14600K, which sits between 4.6 and 4.9 ns; this indicates that both have the same P-core topology.
By core to core, you mean intercore, right? or hyperthread to hyperthread?
> For the E-cores, the latencies shoot up to between 57.9 and 74.8 ns per each L1 access point, with the two first E-cores having a latency of just 5.0 ns.
Am I going crazy? It seems obvious to me those “two first E-cores” are a single P-core.
AI compute capability is just there, then the big cores are just good enough against Zen4, the IGP just as strong on the best scenario (drivers can get the better out of it but still weak on some titles), now overall if we cut IA outside, Meteor Lake gets spanked badly by a gen old Ryzen. The good is that everything seems to work even coming in different tiles for being a tech demo, but i suspect that the BOM of the Ryzen 9 7940HS is lower being a monolithic 180mm2 design, Intel probably had to spent a lot of "glue" per mm2 of silicon.
The glue might not be cheap but TSMC 6nm sure is, and 5nm isn't wildly expensive either.
This Intel 4 tile though is clearly so far from finished. This is a horrifying showing for Intel Foundry's fab capabilities even if their packaging is clearly fantastic. And we are so overdue for the current larger cores to get dropped and the design roadmap for Atom forked into a large and small core.
Like other mentioned, these aren't comparable products. That really shows up when you look at the battery life comparisons. The 155H has a 75W-H batter vs 69W-H on the 7940HS, 9% more capacity. Yet it lasts 95% longer in the rundown test. That's going to show up in performance too. HotHardware has a much better comparison, a 165H against comparable products like the 7736U and Z1 Extreme (30W TDP), as well as last gen RL 1365U (15W / 55 max). The 165H had the longest battery life in their test of any machine tested, 1/3 more than the Z1 Extreme.
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Dante Verizon - Thursday, April 11, 2024 - link
Too strange... in the spec2017 test that represents Blender MeteorLake wins but in the real Blender test it loses? GreatDante Verizon - Thursday, April 11, 2024 - link
The iGPU performance of desktop APUs is also abnormally low.Gavin Bonshor - Friday, April 12, 2024 - link
Could you please elaborate? Did another publication's results land higher? Did they run JEDEC memory settings?ballsystemlord - Thursday, April 11, 2024 - link
That near 50% increase in DRAM access latency coupled with the higher thermal limitations is probably what's holding the 115H back.Ryan Smith - Thursday, April 11, 2024 - link
Keep in mind that they're different workloads with different versions of Blender. The version in SPEC2017 is from 7 years ago, which was the Blender 2.7 era.mode_13h - Monday, April 15, 2024 - link
spec2017 is using an old version of Blender that's frozen in time. That's needed to make all spec2017 results comparable with each other.In the individual Rendering benchmarks, Gavin used a reasonably current version of Blender (3.6 is a LTS release from June 27, 2023), probably also built with a different compiler.
Hulk - Thursday, April 11, 2024 - link
"AMD Arc" in GPU specs?Gavin Bonshor - Friday, April 12, 2024 - link
Yeah, that was a really weird one. It has since been corrected.Fozzie - Thursday, April 11, 2024 - link
Why is the text seemingly out of line with the actual results? Repeatedly it is describing wins for the U7 155H that don't seem to be backed up in the actual benchmarks. For example:"As we can see from our rendering results, the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H is very competitive in single-threaded performance and is ahead of AMD's Zen 4 mobile Phoenix-based Ryzen 9 7940HS."
Actually, the graphs don't show a single instance of the Ultra 7155H besting the Ryzen 9 7940HS in ALL of the preceding graphs.
"Looking at performance in our web and office-based testing, in the UL Procyon Office-based tests using Microsoft Office, the Core Ultra 7 155H is actually outperforming the AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS, which is a good win in itself."
How is 6,792 greater than 7,482? How is 6,978 higher than 7,162?
Did the benchmarks get updated after the text was written? Did someone write the summary text and not pay attention to "Higher is better" vs "Lower is better"?
phoenix_rizzen - Thursday, April 11, 2024 - link
The text describing the Spec tests are also incorrect."Even though the Core Ultra 7 155H is technically an SoC, it remains competitive in the SPECint2017 section of our single-thread testing against the Ryzen 9 7940HS. The AMD chip performs better in two of the tests (525.x264_r and 548.exchange2_r); on the whole, Intel is competitive."
Except the graph shows the AMD system beating the Intel system in 7 tests and only losing by a small margin in 3 of them. The AMD system even beats the Intel desktop system in 4 tests and ties it in 1.
"In the second section of our single-threaded testing, we again see a very competitive showing in SPECfp2017 between the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H and the AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS. The only test we see a major gain for the Ryzen 9 7940HS is in the 503.bwaves_r test, which is a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation."
Except the AMD system wins in 4 tests, essentially ties in 5 tests, and only loses in 2. It even beat the desktop system in 3 tests.
The text is nowhere near consistent with the graphs.
Gavin Bonshor - Friday, April 12, 2024 - link
I refer to it as a major gain; the other victories weren't huge. That was my point[email protected] - Thursday, April 11, 2024 - link
Comparing the 155H to the 7940HS is apples to oranges. A better comparison would be the 185H.Bigos - Thursday, April 11, 2024 - link
What happened to SPECint rate-N 502.gcc_r results? I do not believe desktop Raptor Lake is 16-40x faster than the mobile CPUs...SarahKerrigan - Thursday, April 11, 2024 - link
No, something is clearly wrong there. I deal with SPEC a lot for work and that's an abnormally low result unless it was actually being run in rate-1 mode (ie, someone forgot to properly set the number of copies.)Gavin Bonshor - Friday, April 12, 2024 - link
I am currently investigating this. Thank you for highlighting it. I have no idea how I missed this. I can only apologizemode_13h - Monday, April 15, 2024 - link
While we're talking about SPEC2017 scores, I'd like to add that I really miss the way your reviews used to feature the overall cumulative SPECfp and SPECint scores. It was useful in comparing overall performance, both of the systems included in your review and those from other reviews.To see what I mean, check out the bottom of this page: https://www.anandtech.com/show/17047/the-intel-12t...
Ryan Smith - Monday, April 15, 2024 - link
That's helpful feedback. It's a bit late to add it to this article, but that's definitely something I'll keep in mind for the next one. Thanks!mode_13h - Wednesday, April 17, 2024 - link
You're quite welcome!BTW, I assume there's a "standard" way that SPEC computes those cumulative scores. Might want to look up how they do it, if the benchmark doesn't just compute them for you. If you come up with your own way of combining them, your cumulative scores probably won't be comparable to anyone else's.
Ryan Smith - Wednesday, April 17, 2024 - link
"BTW, I assume there's a "standard" way that SPEC computes those cumulative scores."Yes, there is. We don't run all of the SPEC member tests for technical reasons, so there is some added complexity there.
mczak - Thursday, April 11, 2024 - link
Obviously, the cluster topology description is wrong in the core to core latency measturements section, along with the hilarious conclusion the first two E-cores having only 5 ns latency to each other. (First two threads of course belong to a P-core, albeit I have no idea why the core enumeration is apparently 1P-8E-5P-2LPE.)mode_13h - Wednesday, April 17, 2024 - link
I wonder if the reason they did it that way is to do with how programs which explicitly set affinity typically do so. The rationale might be something like:1. Make single-threaded programs and the main thread of multi-threaded programs fast.
2. For multi-threaded programs, the next set of threads should be efficiency-optimized.
Marlin1975 - Thursday, April 11, 2024 - link
So it uses more power and still loses in most things to the AMD chipwow, I thought intel was getting better and this is all they have? Let alone AMDs newer Zen5 chips are coming soon and will only move their lead further.
Pheesh - Thursday, April 11, 2024 - link
well, it definitely isn't using more power, perhaps you skipped over the battery/power section? A lot less power during general office type usage, despite a thinner chassis that can deal with much less thermals etc. But the laptops being compared are so vastly different this whole review seems kinda....meaningless? The razer 14 is a 4lb gaming laptop, with thermals to boot, in a comparatively massive chassis. And it's being compared against a macbook air esque form factor. The reader isn't gaining much from a comparison to another processor that does not exist in a comparable form factor/power envelope.Ryan Smith - Thursday, April 11, 2024 - link
Ultimately that's down to AMD and Intel. One sampled a 42W notebook for their mobile CPU launch, the other sampled a 28W notebook. We've equalized things as much as we can, but we can only test what we have (or in the case of the MSI, get our hands on).tipoo - Thursday, April 11, 2024 - link
M3 would be a great comparison pointTheinsanegamerN - Thursday, April 11, 2024 - link
M3 is an entirely different arch, in a different OS ecosystem, with its own special API. You're comparing apples and giraffes.mode_13h - Monday, April 15, 2024 - link
For those apps which run on both machines, it's absolutely a valid comparison. If all the apps you need are supported on both, then it's useful to see how they compare because you really could pick either one.mode_13h - Monday, April 15, 2024 - link
Toms' review includes M3, however they only have a few benchmarks. It's not as comprehensive a review as this one.https://www.tomshardware.com/laptops/ultrabooks-ul...
clemsyn - Thursday, April 11, 2024 - link
Thanks for the review. Looks like Intel is waking up and going the right direction. I just hope its not too late (which I think it is).meacupla - Thursday, April 11, 2024 - link
135H has 8 Xe cores, not 7Ryan Smith - Thursday, April 11, 2024 - link
Hmm, interesting. We're going to have to double-check with Intel on that.Ark has it down as 8 GPU cores. However the official presentation from the December "launch" had it down as 7: https://images.anandtech.com/galleries/9400/Intel%...
It's not uncommon for Intel presentations to have errors. But they also crop up in Ark from time to time as well. So 8 is probably correct, but we should get confirmation just in case.
meacupla - Friday, April 12, 2024 - link
Yeah, I only noticed the difference when I had to look up why MSI claw was using a 135H.Ryan Smith - Friday, April 12, 2024 - link
And Intel has since confirmed it to be 8. The article (and past articles with the bad info) have been updated. Thanks for pointing that out, meacupla!The_Assimilator - Thursday, April 11, 2024 - link
An entire page, and an entire paragraph in the conclusion, wasted on pointless AI nonsense. Nobody reading this site cares about that rubbish, stop wasting our time.The_Assimilator - Thursday, April 11, 2024 - link
Also good to see Intel's "revolutionary" new chip pulling the exact same BS as their past chips have regarding power. "28W" that actually uses 65W, incredible.mode_13h - Monday, April 15, 2024 - link
The only thing your comment tells me is that the AI benchmarks should be updated to include more typical real-world AI usage examples. Aside from things like Stable Diffusion, where most readers are likely to encounter AI in their everyday computing is in apps like video conferencing (background replacement, noise suppression) and photo editing.NextGen_Gamer - Thursday, April 11, 2024 - link
Those iGPU numbers are way off - the Socket AM5 8700G is obviously going to outperform the mobile variant across the board, based on TDP alone. Even if the mobile version was using LPDDR5X memory (which in this case it wasn't), it wouldn't be enough to close the gap.AnandTech: ever given any though to getting all these chips in mini PC form? Most of those allow much more control over the TDP, along with memory/SSD being your own picks. And then that all but eliminates the cooling issues of a laptop.
meacupla - Thursday, April 11, 2024 - link
While you can get a 7940HS miniPC now, Core Ultra miniPCs aren't out yet.Core Ultra laptops are showing up at reviewers just now, but they've barely left the gate in terms of availability to regular consumers.
Asus announced NUC 14 two weeks ago, on Mar 27. They are just now being listed at various retailers, so I would expect them to show up in stock a month or two from now.
ricebunny - Friday, April 12, 2024 - link
My retailer indicates that the Asus Nuc 14Pro+ is available. I would be curious to see how the 155H performs in that chassis with a lot more thermal headroom.haplo602 - Thursday, April 11, 2024 - link
"On the flip side, as we established with our look at power consumption, the Ryzen 9 7940HS laptop is able to sustain a much higher TDP overall – so that memory bandwidth deficit is counterbalanced by a sizable TDP advantage."Are you really a tech review site ? In this case memory bandwidth is king with TDP a distant second (given comparable compute power). And Intel has a huge advantage with LPDDR5X here that it manages to waste somehow.
Also the official title is CPU review and there are graphs for BATTERY CHARGE TIME ??? Really ? What does that have to do with the CPU at all ?
Ryan Smith - Thursday, April 11, 2024 - link
"Also the official title is CPU review and there are graphs for BATTERY CHARGE TIME ??? Really ? What does that have to do with the CPU at all ?"With these integrated devices, we're reviewing the notebook as much as we're reviewing the chip inside. And in any case, battery life/recharge testing is very straightforward and is something that can be run overnight, so it doesn't get in the way of other testing.
haplo602 - Friday, April 12, 2024 - link
Sure, but then the title should be "Review of 155H and the ASUS Zenbook 14". If it is a CPU review, then the other tests are irrelevant. If it is a device review, then there are things missing.Currently it poses as a some kind of strange hybrid while the title says only CPU review. Basically the content does not match the label on the box ...
mode_13h - Monday, April 15, 2024 - link
> Intel has a huge advantage with LPDDR5X here that it manages to waste somehow.LPDDR5 and 5X are both much higher-latency than regular DDR5. That probably explains some of the performance vs. expectations mismatch.
timecop1818 - Thursday, April 11, 2024 - link
what's with the trend of removing INS key and replacing it with a camera or power or some other useless button. this is getting ridiculous. i use shift-ins to paste all the time, and there are plenty of times when i want to overwrite something without caring to select it, thus needing an ins toggle. what the hell? is this some new crap mandated by the Microsoft ai button initiative?sylwah - Thursday, April 11, 2024 - link
From the inconsistencies between benchmark results and the text, to the comparison between latest Intel and previous gen AMD and the article title, this is clearly paid advertising by either Asus or Intel.Journalism guidelines say paid content should be disclosed, and yet I see it nowhere in the article. Feels like a new low.
Orfosaurio - Thursday, April 11, 2024 - link
Maybe, but there is the presumption of innocence.Ryan Smith - Friday, April 12, 2024 - link
"this is clearly paid advertising by either Asus or Intel."This is not a paid article in any shape or form. We have not received a dime from any party for this review.
To be clear, Intel did supply the Asus laptop for review purposes - as they usually do for mobile-first CPU launches - and we sourced the MSI laptop separately so that we could have a second data point.
jeenam - Friday, April 12, 2024 - link
The benchmarks don't paint the Intel chip in a positive light. I agree with your assessment. The first thing I checked was the Graphics benchmarks as I recently purchased a 7840HS which has the Radeon 780M iGPU. It would seem Company of Heroes and Returnal were cherry-picked for the GPU benchmarks just so it would appear the integrated Intel ARC GPU isn't a dog compared to the 780M.Any objective reader who simply went on benchmarks would make the following honest assessment:
- The Intel ARC GPU is a dog compared to the 780M
- General benchmark performance indicates the Intel chip getting smoked by Ryzen 4
- The one area where Intel has an advantage is battery life
It's obvious the GPU benchmarks included games that were cherry-picked to give the appearance that the Intel ARC GPU can actually be competitive, when most likely if you were to pick a typical suite of games for benchmarking (e.g. GTA V, RE4 Remake, Forza, CS2, etc.) the losses to the 780M would continue to pile up.
Ryan Smith - Friday, April 12, 2024 - link
" It would seem Company of Heroes and Returnal were cherry-picked for the GPU benchmarks just so it would appear the integrated Intel ARC GPU isn't a dog compared to the 780M."To be clear, the benchmarks were picked before we had the hardware. There's a lot of calculus that goes into selecting software for the benchmark suite, but the big things are suitability as a benchmark (i.e. does it even have a benchmark mode), popularity, and performance scalability.
Even then, we kind of whiffed it in the end, as Returnal doesn't break 30fps on current iGPUs.
Hulk - Friday, April 12, 2024 - link
It's a great review and I appreciate it.jeenam - Friday, April 12, 2024 - link
I've been an anandtech reader since 1998 or so and I'm not here to pick a bone. I'm a fan, and hope AT lives on. But did a quick search and the only two major websites with GPU reviews that referenced Returnal or Company of Heroes were Hot Hardware and Ars Technica. An expanded test suite of games might have been more appropriate because it's likely the ARC GPU would have been handily beaten across the board.[email protected] - Thursday, April 11, 2024 - link
Strange. Some of the tests list the 155H as 28W with test results. This is misleading as the SoC uses much more power doing the test.Gavin Bonshor - Friday, April 12, 2024 - link
When we review CPUs, especially when highlighting them in the charts, we list the base TDP, as every motherboard has its own interpretation of what level of power it will push through the chip (Multi-core enhancement).Carmen00 - Friday, April 12, 2024 - link
Yet in another comment, we have Ryan Smith saying "With these integrated devices, we're reviewing the notebook as much as we're reviewing the chip inside."So if you're doing what he says—post the right numbers, because that's what you're doing. And if you're NOT doing what he says, then don't post useless stuff that seems, to my (perhaps overly-critical eye) to exist so that the article can claim that Intel is scoring SOME kind of a win, when the graphs really don't seem to show a heck of a lot of CPU-related win.
I'm fine with either, let me be honest. But I want to see some consistency, that is all.
Ryan Smith - Friday, April 12, 2024 - link
I'm all for trying to make sure you guys get the data that you want to see. But not sure I follow here. We are being consistent in our testing methodology, and taking care to be explicit in that our test systems don't have identical TDPs.https://images.anandtech.com/doci/21282/Core%20Ult...
In a laptop, sustained TDPs are our primary concern, as these devices cannot turbo multiple cores for more than a few seconds. So this is what we're noting in an article like this, to illustrate how we aren't testing devices with matching TDPs.
ballsystemlord - Friday, April 12, 2024 - link
I agree with Ryan here, sustained performance is what you should be looking at. Anything can turbo to infinity.The only real use case for turbo, would be application start-up. But even then, you'd have to be waking the PC from idle and selecting the application in record time for it to matter at all.
lmcd - Wednesday, April 17, 2024 - link
The problem I'm seeing is that this article takes the format of previous laptop reviews but not the depth (in part due to the declining access this publication), and the headline could better fit the contents. It could even be something silly like "The Intel Core Ultra 7 155H Review: Meteor Lake starts with a Moment of Zen(Book)" and be more valuable to the reader.It also did not feel like we really got (even a rehash of) an overview of Meteor Lake as a platform. So to me, this was an ASUS Zenbook review. Framing this as "ASUS ZenBook 14 OLED: A Meteor Lake Thin&Light Review" also better captures its content.
eastcoast_pete - Friday, April 12, 2024 - link
I am not surprised that the Core 7 Meteor Lake isn't beating the Ryzen 7840HS in compute or graphics - that particular Ryzen 4 monolith is (IMHO) currently AMD's best foot forward, and a great APU. However, Intel did do its homework when it comes to the intended use of Meteor Lake SoCs: mobile, especially light and ultralight laptops and 2-in-1s. I don't expect a ~ 1 kg notebook to do that much higher level gaming or compute. I do expect long runtime on battery, fluid use of office and other productivity apps, and otherwise decent performance (speed). Again, AMD's Phoenix/Hawk APUs are, right now, the most performant solutions in that class, but it's good news for all of us that Intel has closed the gap. It'll mean that AMD will have to keep evolving its APUs, and maybe do a better job making them broadly available with good drivers within a few months of announcing them. Because that was not the case with Phoenix, which just took too long to be ready for prime time, and left the opening for Intel to move back into.Lastly, I find that one of the most remarkable things about Meteor Lake is that Intel got its tile design and packaging working quite well. Being able to combine different chips from different fabs (Intel and TSMC) and nodes into a cohesive unit without incurring large hits on performance and efficiency is big step forward.
nandnandnand - Saturday, April 13, 2024 - link
Lunar Lake will be the one to watch. It's Meteor Lake-U evolved (4+4 instead of 2+8, on-package memory by default, decent graphics). Low power mobile chips are more interesting than the 45W+ ones.mode_13h - Monday, April 15, 2024 - link
> Being able to combine different chips from different fabs (Intel and TSMC)> and nodes into a cohesive unit without incurring large hits on performance
> and efficiency is big step forward.
AMD combined chiplets from both TSMC and Global Foundries in the same CPU, all the way back in Zen 2! If you count HBM, they combined chiplets from different foundries as far back as their HD Fury GPUs.
As for performance and efficiency, I find Meteor Lake underwhelming on both fronts. Idle performance and things like video playback gain a benefit from the new SoC architecture, but when it comes to compute-intensive tasks, we see why Intel kept around Raptor Lake for the performance-oriented segment.
lmcd - Wednesday, April 17, 2024 - link
That GloFo combo for Zen 2 and 3 never made it to an efficient mobile platform (HX technically exists but whatever).Intel 4 is an incomplete node. Intel 3 had better fix a lot of the issues because at this point, Intel's best bet looks like an entirely-TSMC SoC.
James5mith - Friday, April 12, 2024 - link
"Meanwhile AMD does not offer a custom execution backend for this test, so while Windows ML is available as a fallback option to access the CPU and the GPU, it does not have access to AMD's NPU."So why are there no graph entries for the AMD GPU using Windows ML? You only show CPU results in the graph. Seems a bit disingenuous.
Tams80 - Friday, April 12, 2024 - link
This is really a rather pathetic comparison. YouTubers can get their hands on more devices for comparison than this.I get it. AnandTech is a dying publication that doesn't have the influence it used to, to get devices. And this also leads to particularly fluffy pieces to appease the few companies that do provide review units.
The Von Matrices - Friday, April 12, 2024 - link
How can a PCIe 4.0 x2 disk have a read speed of 5GB/s? The bus only has a transfer rate of 4GB/s.skavi - Saturday, April 13, 2024 - link
> Starting with the Redwood Cove (P) core cluster on the Core Ultra 7 155H, we can see that the core-to-core access latencies across the P-cores ranges from 4.5 to 4.9 ns, which is very similar to that of Raptor Lake via the Core i5-14600K, which sits between 4.6 and 4.9 ns; this indicates that both have the same P-core topology.By core to core, you mean intercore, right? or hyperthread to hyperthread?
> For the E-cores, the latencies shoot up to between 57.9 and 74.8 ns per each L1 access point, with the two first E-cores having a latency of just 5.0 ns.
Am I going crazy? It seems obvious to me those “two first E-cores” are a single P-core.
jpvalverde85 - Tuesday, April 16, 2024 - link
AI compute capability is just there, then the big cores are just good enough against Zen4, the IGP just as strong on the best scenario (drivers can get the better out of it but still weak on some titles), now overall if we cut IA outside, Meteor Lake gets spanked badly by a gen old Ryzen. The good is that everything seems to work even coming in different tiles for being a tech demo, but i suspect that the BOM of the Ryzen 9 7940HS is lower being a monolithic 180mm2 design, Intel probably had to spent a lot of "glue" per mm2 of silicon.lmcd - Wednesday, April 17, 2024 - link
The glue might not be cheap but TSMC 6nm sure is, and 5nm isn't wildly expensive either.This Intel 4 tile though is clearly so far from finished. This is a horrifying showing for Intel Foundry's fab capabilities even if their packaging is clearly fantastic. And we are so overdue for the current larger cores to get dropped and the design roadmap for Atom forked into a large and small core.
shady28 - Wednesday, April 17, 2024 - link
Like other mentioned, these aren't comparable products.That really shows up when you look at the battery life comparisons. The 155H has a 75W-H batter vs 69W-H on the 7940HS, 9% more capacity. Yet it lasts 95% longer in the rundown test.
That's going to show up in performance too.
HotHardware has a much better comparison, a 165H against comparable products like the 7736U and Z1 Extreme (30W TDP), as well as last gen RL 1365U (15W / 55 max).
The 165H had the longest battery life in their test of any machine tested, 1/3 more than the Z1 Extreme.
kkilobyte - Wednesday, April 24, 2024 - link
Have the SPEC2017 tests been adapted? The text still says to this day that the results will be adapted when they are available.