Intel Core Ultra 7 255H lands 32% faster than the 155H in PassMark’s single-core benchmark

Intel’s Arrow Lake-based Core Ultra 7 255H appears to have been tested in PassMark, where it outperformed its Meteor Lake equivalent by 32% in single-threaded tests (via x86deadandback at X). Across a wide variety of metrics, the 255H is roughly 15% faster in CPU Mark, which is PassMark’s proprietary metric for gauging a CPU’s performance.

Intel revealed its Arrow Lake-H family of processors at CES, shortly followed by a user review at Bilibili, which left much to be desired from these CPUs. Dubbed Core Ultra 200H, these processors employ Intel’s Arrow Lake architecture featuring Lion Cove P-cores and Skymont E-cores. What separates them from desktop chips, apart from the power envelope, is that these CPUs feature an LPE (Low Power Efficient) core cluster on the SoC Tile, a feature reused from Meteor Lake.

Unlike Lunar Lake which uses Battlemage (Xe2) graphics, Arrow Lake-H is armed with up to eight Xe-LPG+ (Alchemist+) cores with support for XMX. As the SoC Tile remains unchanged, Arrow Lake-H’s NPU is capable of dishing out just 13 TOPS of INT8 performance, versus 45 TOPS on Lunar Lake. What is similar to Lunar Lake is the process node: TSMC’s N3B, a step-up from Intel 4 used with Meteor Lake.

The Core Ultra 7 255H in question packs 16 cores, divided into six P-cores, eight E-cores, and two LPE-cores with 16 threads in total, as Arrow Lake lacks hyperthreading support. The Core Ultra 7 155H on the contrary is equipped with a similar layout but 22 threads. In PassMark’s single-core benchmark, the 255H blazes past its predecessor, scoring 4,631 points compared to the 155H’s 3,500 points for a 32% lead. This is a direct result of the updated Lion Cove P-cores and N3B process, allowing a 300 MHz bump in boost clocks. When aggregated, the CPU Mark rating puts Arrow Lake ahead by around 15%.

Relatively speaking, efficiency remains the Achilles’ heel of these chips, as the 16-core Core Ultra 9 285H failed to beat the 10-core Ryzen AI 9 365 when limited to 50W of power. While Arrow Lake-H offers an updated Compute Tile and a slightly modified Graphics Tile, the SoC, and IOE Tiles are largely carried over from Meteor Lake.

It all comes down to how these laptops are priced since Strix Point devices still have an entry price of around $1,000. On that note, it is important to mention that the 15W variant of these Intel chips, Core Ultra 200U, is reported to be based on Meteor Lake with Redwood Cove+ P-cores and Crestmont+ E-cores fabbed on Intel 3, a node once reserved for Intel’s server counterparts. This will allow Intel to extract higher margins with possibly lower prices for us, though we haven’t exactly found affordable Arrow Lake laptops to be abundant, at least not yet.