Some performance benchmarks of Intel’s upcoming Core Ultra 300V “Lunar Lake” processors have leaked out, courtesy of Jaykihn on X. The numbers include Cinebench R23, Geekbench, Crossmark, Sysmark, and 3DMark Timespy. We’ll skip Geekbench as that is primarily an indicator of light workloads such as browsing, application startup times, etc. Let’s compare the Cinebench R23 numbers to existing Intel and AMD Ryzen chips.
Cinebench is an apt representation of content creation workloads like rendering and tends to net similar figures as Blender and Cinema 4D. In the R23 multi-core benchmark, the Core Ultra 300V scores 10212 points, about as much as the Core Ultra 7 165U “Meteor Lake” part, and 20-25% slower than the Ryzen 7 7840U. These are all 28W SKUs released in the last one year.
The Lunar Lake sample performs better in Crossmark, posting 1801 points, 3% higher than the Ryzen 7 7840U and approximately 20% faster than the Core Ultra 7 165U. The difference in performance in the two benchmarks boils down to what workloads these tests simulate. Crossmark is a set of benchmarks including light browsing, content creation, file compression, multimedia, etc, and each benefit from different processor resources.
Cinebench R23 proxies compute-intensive rendering tasks that benefit from core counts and clocks (including SMT which Lunar Lake lacks). Consequently, as Lunar only features 4 P-cores (and 4 LPE cores) without hyperthreading, it has difficulty keeping up with the Ryzen 7 7740U and its Meteor Lake predecessor.
Lunar Lake’s Timespy score looks promising, posting 4151 points at 30W, just short of the Radeon 890M on the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370. However, it’s important to note that even the Core Ultra 7 155H was faster than the Ryzen 7 7840HS in 3DMark. But, it was utterly obliterated in real-world gaming workloads.
Lunar Lake looks promising on the CPU side (barring content creation and heavy compute), but the Arc Battlemage Xe2 graphics won’t stand a chance against the RDNA 3.5 “Radeon 880M/890M) till Intel’s graphics drivers are better tuned for a wider range of games.
Further reading:
- AMD Ryzen AI 300 “Strix Point” Uses Cut-Down CPU Cores & Similar Instruction Throughput as Zen 4
- AMD Ryzen 9000 vs Intel 15th Gen/Core Ultra 300 CPUs Specs, Pricing, and Release Date
