Tuesday, December 12th 2023
Intel Core Ultra 5 125H Squares off Against AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS in Benchmark Leak
The Intel Core Ultra 5 125H is designed to be a middle-of-the-market processor SKU from Intel's next generation "Meteor Lake" processor family. It comes with a CPU core configuration of 14-core/18-thread. That's 4P+8E+2L (four performance cores, eight efficiency cores, two low-power island cores), although with a full featured Xe-LPG iGPU that has all 8 Xe cores (128 EU) enabled. The chip is normally rated for a 28 W power envelope, although OEMs such as Lenovo have developed a custom 65 W "power mode," which raises the base power value.
A Chinese PC enthusiast with access to an unreleased Lenovo notebook based on this processor, including Lenovo's 65 W Mode toggle, benchmarked it, and compared it with a notebook powered by an AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS "Phoenix" processor (8-core/16-thread, "Zen 4," Radeon 780M iGPU with all 12 compute units enabled); and another notebook powered by Intel's current middle-of-market chip in the H-segment, the Core i5-13500H "Raptor Lake" (4P+8E, Xe-LP iGPU with 5 Xe cores or 80 EU). The results were a little unexpected. The Xe-LPG iGPU of the 125H is shown beating both the Radeon 780M of the Ryzen, and the Xe-LP iGPU of the i5-13500H, with the highest 3DMark Time Spy and Fire Strike scores in the comparison. The Xe-LPG iGPU is 15% faster than the Radeon 780M in Time Spy, and 6% faster in Fire Strike. It's a whopping 70% faster than the Xe-LP iGPU of the "Raptor Lake" chip in this comparison. Things are shockingly different on the CPU performance front for the "Meteor Lake" chip.In the Cinebench R20 multi-threaded benchmark, the Ryzen 7 7840HS is 10% faster than the Core Ultra 5 125H. It is 6.5% faster in the Cinebench R20 single-threaded benchmark, which is surprising, given that the "Redwood Cove" P-cores of "Meteor Lake" should come with a higher IPC than the "Zen 4" core of the Ryzen. We're not quite sure what's happening here. One possible explanation is that the enthusiast behind the tests used Lenovo's 65 W mode on all three notebooks, and the Ryzen is somehow able to hold onto its boost frequencies better; or there's a software-level problem preventing the benchmarks from correctly scheduling across all 14 cores on the "Meteor Lake."
Sources:
HXL (Twitter), VideoCardz
A Chinese PC enthusiast with access to an unreleased Lenovo notebook based on this processor, including Lenovo's 65 W Mode toggle, benchmarked it, and compared it with a notebook powered by an AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS "Phoenix" processor (8-core/16-thread, "Zen 4," Radeon 780M iGPU with all 12 compute units enabled); and another notebook powered by Intel's current middle-of-market chip in the H-segment, the Core i5-13500H "Raptor Lake" (4P+8E, Xe-LP iGPU with 5 Xe cores or 80 EU). The results were a little unexpected. The Xe-LPG iGPU of the 125H is shown beating both the Radeon 780M of the Ryzen, and the Xe-LP iGPU of the i5-13500H, with the highest 3DMark Time Spy and Fire Strike scores in the comparison. The Xe-LPG iGPU is 15% faster than the Radeon 780M in Time Spy, and 6% faster in Fire Strike. It's a whopping 70% faster than the Xe-LP iGPU of the "Raptor Lake" chip in this comparison. Things are shockingly different on the CPU performance front for the "Meteor Lake" chip.In the Cinebench R20 multi-threaded benchmark, the Ryzen 7 7840HS is 10% faster than the Core Ultra 5 125H. It is 6.5% faster in the Cinebench R20 single-threaded benchmark, which is surprising, given that the "Redwood Cove" P-cores of "Meteor Lake" should come with a higher IPC than the "Zen 4" core of the Ryzen. We're not quite sure what's happening here. One possible explanation is that the enthusiast behind the tests used Lenovo's 65 W mode on all three notebooks, and the Ryzen is somehow able to hold onto its boost frequencies better; or there's a software-level problem preventing the benchmarks from correctly scheduling across all 14 cores on the "Meteor Lake."
29 Comments on Intel Core Ultra 5 125H Squares off Against AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS in Benchmark Leak
Meteor Lake is all about tile packaging, NPU, IGP and E cores. I don’t even think the IPC is going up on Arrow Lake P cores.
The Meteor Lake presentation is very vague on performance claims. Even though TPU claims IPC P core increases in the article text, nothing like that is stated in the presentation slides.
www.techpowerup.com/review/intel-meteor-lake-technical-deep-dive/
Maybe Intel engineers said it verbally during the keynote.
2 - There is massive variation in laptop cooling solutions, firmware based Freq/Power curves, so again a poor comparison
3 - There is a desperate attempt to spin this as a ST perf regression with no tangible evidence
4 - The IGP is much better and needs an opportunity to stretch its legs
Disregarding where the performance stands, Intel badly needs the efficiency increase from the node shrink as shown from the Redwood Cove V-F leak. It's not up for debate, Ryzen is far more usable in the -U and -P segments, when away from the wall, because Intel still can't provide a dynamic enough solution for power and clocks. So if they can make major improvements on that front, I don't see a huge problem here - right now 13th gen -U performance is in the absolute toilet and 13th gen -P is too hot and hungry. Meteor Lake needs to fill that gap where Phoenix -U conveniently sits - going higher for -H Intel can just crank up the Vcore and power like they always do.
Hardware scheduling improvements are always welcome.
Besides, for both AMD and Intel (even more so for 13th gen -H here), laptop specific design and optimization always makes or breaks an otherwise healthy CPU, so these scores mean next to nothing at this time.
If we're going to use Evo as a crutch, then take the Galaxy Book3 with 13th -P against the 6850U Eliteboom 16 for a head to head on the exact same battery capacity (and an i5 against R7 with 680M, no less).
There is a very real need for Meteor Lake in the thin and light segment. It's pretty plain to see from basically every ThinkPad ever after Rembrandt released - two of the same model is almost universally better served by Ryzen.
Till then: laptopmedia.com/laptops-with-the-best-battery-life/
FYI, I think notebookcheck.net is one of the best websites for laptop and mobile SoC/GPU reviews and benchmarks, they have a huge amount of data, the ability to directly compare any piece of hardware to another, and often have had benchmark data on mobile CPUs and GPUs or Laptop models I haven't found anywhere else.
Edit: TPU claims ‘serious’ P and E core IPC increases in the hardware updates articles without reference.
www.techpowerup.com/review/future-hardware-releases/
I’m guessing there was some rumor awhile back or a now defunct Intel claim about IPC increases in Meteor Lake P cores but I still don’t know the original source.
To be fair, looking at just the P cores nowadays no longer makes sense even if it makes us enthusiasts sad. The whole package has ‘increased computational’ abilities if you look at everything: NPU, P cores, E cores and iGPU. Even the IO tile has cores now.
Meteor Lake - Zen 4 killer, eficiency monster :roll:
Arrow Lake - 30-40% faster ST than Raptor Lake, (the last rumours point at 5% IPC increase) :roll:
Panther Lake - 30-40% faster ST than Arrow Lake, 90-95% faster ST than raptor lake in 2 years :roll:
Intel locking H chips and way over priced HX chips pretty much made my choice for me
Which is amd 7840hs on an acer 17 nitro with 4060.
The multi-thread score of the 185H is a big step forward from the 13800H. But even allowing for the slight speed difference between the two, I can't see any sign of a significant increase in single-thread performance if these bench marks are correct.
I think Intel is readjusting transistor real estate amongst the tiles to increase efficiency and add new capabilities at the detriment of increased single threaded CPU performance.
www.notebookcheck.net/Samsung-Galaxy-Book3-Pro-16-review-Office-laptop-with-Core-i5-power-and-a-long-battery-life.715024.0.html
www.notebookcheck.net/HP-EliteBook-865-G9-Laptop-review-1000-nits-Sure-View-display-not-quite-up-to-par.675587.0.html
www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-ThinkPad-T14-G3-review-Business-laptop-is-worse-with-Intel-and-Nvidia.702431.0.html
www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-ThinkPad-T14-G3-review-Business-laptop-is-better-with-AMD-Ryzen-Pro.657465.0.html
www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-ThinkPad-X13-G3-laptop-review-Endurance-in-outdoor-use-with-Intel-Alder-Lake-U.670955.0.html
www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-ThinkPad-X13-G3-AMD-Laptop-Review-Already-very-good-ThinkPad-even-better-with-Ryzen-6000.728756.0.html
www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-ThinkPad-T14s-G4-Intel-Laptop-Review-OLED-instead-of-battery-life.758333.0.html
www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-ThinkPad-T14s-G4-review-Business-laptop-is-better-with-AMD-Zen4.763581.0.html
ffs you don't need to look past entry #1 on the laptopmedia list. Between 2 identical X1 Gen11s with 57Wh battery, subbing in the 1365U for the 1370P cuts battery life in half. It's the textbook -U vs -P example that has played out everywhere else: no perf vs no battery, your choice.
Meteor Lake can only be a positive in this TDP segment, so I'm not sure why you're defending a thoroughly terrible product against it?
You said P parts are power hogs, I simply asked how much of a power hog can they be if they can offer 9.5h+ of battery life in Intel Evo designs?
-P exists from 12th gen onwards solely because from 12th gen onwards -U is completely inadequate against Ryzen -U. Doubling power draw across the board (TDP and actual) to stay "competitive" is considered a given now?
Or are you just going to keep fixating on the 9.5Wh number, which doesn't actually address the whole point about efficiency in any way?
Did you not use it for three of those hours hehe