Recently I ran benchmarks looking at the Xe2 graphics performance gains on Intel Lunar Lake over the past year with what's shipped by Ubuntu and comparing against our original tests of the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition. With those Lunar Lake iGPU benchmarks out of the way, here is a look at how the Lunar Lake CPU performance has evolved on Linux since April 2025.
With the prior testing focused on the Xe2 iGPU gains with Lunar Lake from Ubuntu 25.04 to Ubuntu 26.04, this article is looking at the CPU side. The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition for this testing then and now is done with the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V, the 8-core part with a 4.8GHz maximum turbo frequency, 17 Watt TDP, and 32GB of memory.
The original tests of the Core Ultra 7 258V / ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 were done last April with Ubuntu 25.04 with the Linux 6.14 kernel, Mesa 25.0, GCC 14.2, and other default components. With the newly-released Ubuntu 26.04 we are now up to the Linux 7.0 kernel, GCC 15.2, Mesa 26.0, and the GNOME 50 desktop, among other software upgrades in this new Ubuntu Long Term Support version.
This testing is primarily driven by curiosity in wondering how the Lunar Lake performance has evolved over the past year and what kind of gains may be on the table for those using an older Ubuntu release still with Intel Lunar Lake laptops in moving forward to Ubuntu 26.04 LTS that officially debuted last week.