AMD's 12-core Zen 5 mobile flagship, the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, has debuted on PassMark. The Zen 5-based processor showed competitive performance against Apple's top-of-the-line M3 Max CPU, beating the 14-core variant and approaching the 16-core in the single and multi-threaded scores. The chip surpassed Intel's outgoing Raptor Lake high-performance HX series CPUs, beating the Core i7-14700HX. All comparisons were taken from the multi-core results in PassMark's list of CPU benchmarks.
The Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 scored 37,699 points in PassMark's multi-threaded benchmark and 4,213 points in PassMark's single-threaded benchmark. The Zen 5 CPU's score barely surpasses Apple's 14-core M3 Max, beating it by 4%. Apple's beefier 16-core M3 Max manages to get ahead of the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, but only by 7%, making the Zen 5 CPU extremely competitive with both parts.
The Ryzen AI 9 part was also very performant against some of Intel's outgoing high-performance Raptor Lake parts. Despite being optimized for thin-and-light use — and having fewer cores, the Zen 5 chip outperformed Intel's 20-core Core i7-14700HX by 4%.
The only chips the Ryzen AI 9 chip struggled to compete with were Intel's flagship Core i9 HX-series CPUs and AMD's high-performance Dragon Range Ryzen 9 parts. For instance, Intel's Core i9-14900HX outperformed the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 by a healthy 23% and AMD's Ryzen 9 7940HX by an even greater 42%.
AMD's Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 is its latest flagship mobile part, featuring its new Zen 5 CPU architecture. The chip comes with two core clusters consisting of four Zen 5 cores and eight compact Zen 5c cores. Clock speed maxes out at 5.1 GHz boost, with a TDP of 28W (but configurable from 15W to 54W). The chip also has 36MB of cache and AMD's top-of-the-line Radeon 890M integrated graphics with 16 CUs running on the more power-efficient RDNA 3.5 architecture.
PassMark's performance numbers back up AMD's claims that the HX 370 is going toe-to-toe with Apple's M3 silicon. If PassMark's results indicate real-world performance, AMD will finally have a chip that can match Apple's silicon performance in a power envelope similar to that of Apple's M3-powered Macbooks.
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The Zen 5-based processor showed competitive performance against Apple's top-of-the-line M3 Max CPU, beating the 14-core variant and approaching the 16-core in the single and multi-threaded scores.
Um, so the table shows the Apple M3 Max 16 Core with a single-threaded score of 4,779, while the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 manages only 4,213. That's a gap of nearly 12%! That's non-trivial and not really "approaching", which I'd infer as a gap in the lower single-digits.
Single-threaded performance is hard, especially in a mobile context, and greatly impacts perceived responsiveness. It should count for a lot more than multi-threaded performance, especially in laptops.
Single-threaded performance is hard, especially in a mobile context, and greatly impacts perceived responsiveness. It should count for a lot more than multi-threaded performance, especially in laptops.
Purely out of interest I’d like to see the differences in the instruction execution between competitive architects. What are the tricks? How do they make function x quicker? Wide decode paths.. fine, when I was learning a cpu had an instruction set and for example x86 was directly implemented.
Transmeta Crusoe came with a general purpose execution engine with a decode module that could take an instruction (set) and convert instructions from CISC into RISC. Intel and AMD both implement a similar solution today.
Data was processed in order, no speculative execution. Things were simple, understandable, today the operation of a cpu is a mystery…
