A small driver update has a big impact on Meteor Lake’s performance on Linux laptops. A single line of code can provide an increase of up to 72 percent.

A single custom line of code in the Intel Meteor Lake CPU driver for Linux makes a huge difference in performance, sometimes increasing by as much as 72 percent.

The patch addresses the way in which the balance between efficiency and performance is achieved in the P-cores of a Core Ultra CPU. In the driver, Intel applies the P-State Energy Performance Preference (EPP)-Default balance_performancevalue. EPP can contain a value between 0 and 255 and was 128 at launch, dropped to 115 in an update and now reaches 64 with the latest patch.

More efficient

Tests show that after value optimization, the CPUs are both more powerful and more efficient. For example, playing videos consumes 52 percent less power and performance per watt increases by 11 percent in an Acer Swift Go 14 with Intel Core Ultra 155H. In a specific video encoding benchmark, performance even increases by 72 percent.