Intel Core Ultra 5 CPU middling benchmarks leak out ahead of launch

The Intel Core Ultra 5 135U is due to launch in December, and experts have already said this Meteor Lake CPU sports an unusual configuration and unimpressive performance

The first generation of the Core Ultra “Meteor Lake” CPUs from Intel are due to make their debut on December 14, and in advance of this official launch, details have already appeared within the Geekbench benchmarking database.

The benchmarking figures reveal some surprises regarding the Intel Core Ultra 5 135U, as it does not seem to match its siblings in the ‘U’ line-up of Core Ultra chips. In particular, it has 12 cores and 14 threads, but these cores are split between 8 E-Cores, 2 P-Cores, and two low-power E-cores. This particular configuration is not shared by any other chip in the range so far.

Intel Core Ultra 5 clock speed and overall performance

Other specs for this chip include clock speeds that range from 2.10 GHz, with an additional 4.4 GHz boost and 12MB of L3 cache. The chip being tested was installed in a laptop with 32 GB of DDR5 memory.

Geekbench

Concerning overall performance, the numbers were not spectacular. However, it should be noted that this chip is an early sample and the correct optimizations for firmware and drivers have not yet been made. The Intel Core Ultra 5 135U scored 2174 points in single-core performance and 9396 points in multi-core tests using Geekbench 6.

These figures put it only barely above the AMD Ryzen 7 6800, and well below the Intel Core i7-13500 and Ryzen 7 7840, which posted multi-core performance scores of 10,000 and 12,000 respectively on the same test.

Ten variants of the Ultra 5 Meteor Lake CPUs have been leaked so far, and early reports suggest that these new CPUs will only be available in limited quantities when they go on sale on December 14, 2023. A higher-end version of the chip called the Core Ultra 9 is expected to go on sale sometime in early 2024.