The Intel Core Ultra 5 125H is a mid-range Meteor Lake family chip that debuted in December 2023. This 1st Gen Core Ultra processor has come to replace 13th generation Core chips; it has 14 cores (4 + 8 + 2) and 18 threads at its disposal. Its Performance cores, of which there are 4, are HT-enabled and run at up to 4.5 GHz while its Efficient cores, of which there are 10 (8 main cores plus 2 extra ones found in the Low Power Island), run at up to 3.6 GHz. The 7-core Arc GPU, just out of the oven, serves as the integrated graphics adapter - this runs at up to 2.20 GHz - and there is a bevy of other brand-new technologies on offer as well, including the integrated AI Boost NPU with two Gen 3 engines for hardware AI workload acceleration.
Architecture and Features
With Meteor Lake, Intel intends to deliver higher CPU performance, higher GPU performance and at the same time, longer battery life than what Raptor Lake chips were capable of. The company also wants a large piece of the AI cake and is working with Microsoft and other partners to make that happen. As a result, Windows Defender is now AI-enabled, meaning it can use the Intel NPU to take some of the load off the main CPU cores. We also get this new Intel Device Discovery technology that is designed to give us a better hardware-based remote laptop management than ever before; and, to make things even better, Intel now offers a dedicated Arc Pro graphics driver for workstations.
This generation of Intel Core processors features Redwood architecture P-cores and Crestwood architecture E-cores. Both come with slight architectural improvements over Raptor Cove and Gracemont respectively for slightly higher performance-per-clock figures; the interesting thing is that of the 10 E-cores, two are actually a separate cluster located on what Intel calls a "Low Power Island". Essentially, the latter is an SoC within an SoC that can stay active while most other parts of the chip are temporarily switched off to save power. The low-power E-cores run at up to 2.5 GHz. Intel hopes this approach will let it deliver unprecedentedly low power consumption figures when under low load, boosting battery life of laptops and tablets powered by Meteor Lake.
To build its Meteor Lake processors, Intel uses the Foveros technology (stacking several chips on top of each other). This is a cost-cutting measure more than anything else, as manufacturing several small dies on several different processes is so much cheaper than making a huge single die and hoping that there are no defects in it that will require disabling some parts of it.
Elsewhere, the Core Ultra 5 125H comes with 18 MB of L3 cache which is a significant reduction compared to the 24 MB that the 155H, the 165H and the 185H have. The processor has a very healthy number of PCIe 5 and PCIe 4 lanes for NVMe SSD speeds up to 15.7 GB/s; it supports RAM running at up to 7467 MHz (DDR5-5600, LPDDR5-7467, LPDDR5x-7467, to be specific - which is about as good as what 8040 series Ryzen chips have). Naturally, the 125H features built-in Thunderbolt 4 support and Intel CNVi Wi-Fi support. It is also worth mentioning that Intel chose to keep native SATA III support that AMD had removed from its Ryzen processors quite a while ago.
The 125H is compatible with 64-bit Windows 10, 64-bit Windows 11 and with many Linux distros.
Performance
While we have no way of knowing what the 125H will be like, as of December 2023, it's safe to expect the chip to be slightly slower than the Ryzen 7 7735HS (Zen 3 Plus, 8 cores, 16 threads, up to 4.75 GHz), as far as multi-thread performance is concerned.
Either way, real-world performance of the chip may vary significantly depending on how high the CPU power limits are and how competent the cooling solution of the system is.
Graphics
The 7-core Arc GPU running at up to 2.20 GHz is set to overshadow the Radeon 760M; just like the 8-core Arc GPU, this graphics adapter is set to be miles ahead of the aging Xe-series integrated GPUs. As long as one chooses to take Intel's word for it, that is.
A proper DX12 Ultimate graphics adapter, the Arc is no stranger to ray tracing and other modern technologies including AI frame generation (XeSS). It will let you connect up to four SUHD 4320p monitors and it will both HW-encode and HW-encode the most widely used video codecs including AVC, HEVC and AV1 in a fast and efficient manner.
Your mileage may vary depending on how high the CPU power limits are, how competent the cooling solution of your system is, how fast the RAM of your system is. The latter is really important; Intel stresses that for the Arc to deliver the best results possible, multi-channel RAM configuration is a must.
Power consumption
The Base power consumption, in the case of the 125H, is 28 W while its maximum Turbo power consumption is supposed to be within 115 W. A powerful cooling solution is a must for any system powered by this chip.
This Core Ultra 5 series processor is comprised of five small chips ("tiles") that are connected using Intel's Foveros technology. The tile containing main CPU cores is produced on the fairly modern 7 nm Intel process marketed as Intel 4 while most other tiles (the iGPU, the I/O die, ...) are built with TSMC's N5 and N6 processes. The base tile is built with the old Intel 22FFL process.
The Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100 is a pretty fast ARM architecture processor (SoC) for use in Windows laptops. The X1E-78-100 is the least powerful member of the Snapdragon X Elite processor series, as of May 2024; as such, it has 12 Oryon CPU cores (3 clusters of equally powerful cores; 12 threads) running at no more than 3.4 GHz. Other key features include the 3.8 TFLOPS Adreno X1-85 iGPU, the 45 TOPS Hexagon NPU and an impressively fast LPDDR5x-8448 memory controller.
The top dog, known as the Snapdragon X Elite X1E-84-100, is thought to be based on the same die with the same NPU but with higher GPU clock speeds, higher CPU clock speeds and possibly higher power targets as well.
Architecture and Features
Qualcomm Oryon cores are in part based on Nuvia IP; they most likely make use of the ARM v8.7 microarchitecture. Much like modern AMD and Intel processors, the Snapdragon chip is compatible with USB 4 and thus with Thunderbolt 4 but it remains to be seen if the X Elite is compatible with GeForce or Radeon discrete graphics cards.
The SoC is said to have 12 PCIe 4 and 4 PCIe 3 lanes for connecting various kinds of devices. NVMe SSDs are supported with a throughput of up to 7.9 GB/s; furthermore, most laptops built around the chip are expected to have 16 GB of LPDDR5X-8448 RAM. There is also a 45 TOPS NPU for accelerating AI workloads.
Performance
Our first benchmarks (featuring a 35 W X Elite X1E-78-100) revealed very decent CPU performance figures that see the X Elite going head-to-head with the AMD Ryzen 7 7840U. It's also not much faster or slower than the Apple M3 chip with 10 GPU cores. While not groundbreaking, this should be good enough for the user to be able to run any applications in 2024 and 2025.
Like any other Windows on ARM platform, the Snapdragon X chip works best with applications and games compiled specifically for ARM processors. If making use of the built-in x86 to ARM emulation mode, a performance penalty of about 20% is to be expected.
Graphics
The integrated 3.8 TFLOPS Adreno X1-85 GPU is DirectX 12-enabled but not DirectX 12 Ultimate-enabled, despite featuring VRS and ray tracing support. The 3.8 TFLOPS of performance that it supposedly delivers pale in comparison to the slowest current-generation professional Nvidia Ada graphics card for laptops, the RTX 500 Ada, that's good for up to 9.2 TFLOPS.
Its gaming performance is rather underwhelming according to our in-house testing results. While slightly faster than the aging Iris Xe (96 EUs), the Adreno fails to outgun the Radeon 780M meaning there is little point in comparing it with full-fat discrete graphics cards. Baldur's Gate 3, a triple-A title released in 2023, is pretty much unplayable at 1080p / Low. GTA V, a game that saw the light of day in 2015, is playable at 1080p / High.
The Qualcomm iGPU will let you use up to 3 UHD 2160p monitors simultaneously. 2160p120 integrated displays are supported, as are the popular AV1, HEVC and AVC video codecs (both decoding and encoding). The hardware does not support the VVC codec; that feature remains a Lunar Lake exclusive for now.
Power consumption
The X1E-78-100 is set to be slightly less power-hungry than its morepowerful brothers. Expect to see anything between 20 W and 45 W under long-term workloads depending on the system and on the performance profile chosen. That's exactly what Ryzen HS chips normally consume.
The SoC is built with a 4 nm TSMC process for decent, as of H1 2024, energy efficiency.
Average Benchmarks Intel Core Ultra 5 125H → 100%n=26
Average Benchmarks Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100 → 98%n=26
- Range of benchmark values for this graphics card - Average benchmark values for this graphics card * Smaller numbers mean a higher performance 1 This benchmark is not used for the average calculation
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