From Intel’s upcoming “Meteor Lake” processor family, the Core Ultra 5 125H is intended to be a middle-of-the-road processor SKU. It has a 14-core, 18-thread CPU configuration out of the box. With a fully functional Xe-LPG iGPU that has all 8 Xe cores (128 EU) enabled, that’s 4P+8E+2L (four performance cores, eight efficiency cores, and two low-power island cores). Although OEMs like Lenovo have created a unique 65 W “power mode,” which increases the base power value, the chip is normally rated for a 28 W power envelope.

The notebook was benchmarked and compared with a notebook powered by AMD Ryzen 7 7840HS “Phoenix” (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-the-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 enthusiast from China had access to an unreleased Lenovo notebook based on this processor, including Lenovo’s 65 W Mode toggle. The outcomes were somewhat surprising. With the highest 3DMark Time Spy and Fire Strike scores in the comparison, the Xe-LPG iGPU of the 125H is seen to outperform both the Radeon 780M of the Ryzen and the Xe-LP iGPU of the i5-13500H.In Time Spy and Fire Strike, the Xe-LPG iGPU outperforms the Radeon 780M by 15% and 6%, respectively. In this comparison, it outperforms the Xe-LP iGPU of the “Raptor Lake” chip by an astounding 70%. Regarding the “Meteor Lake” chip’s CPU performance, things are remarkably different.

10% faster than the Core Ultra 5 125H, the Ryzen 7 7840HS runs the Cinebench R20 multi-threaded benchmark. Surprisingly, it is 6.5% faster in the Cinebench R20 single-threaded benchmark with the “Redwood Cove” P-cores of “Meteor Lake” having a higher IPC than the Ryzen “Zen 4” core. We are unsure of the exact nature of this situation. The Ryzen is able to maintain its boost frequencies better, which could be explained by the enthusiast who ran the tests using Lenovo’s 65 W mode on all three notebooks; alternatively, there might be a software issue preventing the benchmarks from correctly scheduling across all 14 cores on the “Meteor Lake.”