AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370: 100+ Benchmarks Validate Zen 5's Captivating Power Efficiency & Performance
When taking the geometric mean of the 100+ benchmarks run for this launch day article, the Ryzen AI 0 HX 370 was overall about 10% faster than the Ryzen 7 7840HS and about 18% faster than the Ryzen 7 7840U... Not bad, considering those prior Zen 4 parts were all Zen 4 full fat cores compared to the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 having four Zen 5 cores and eight Zen 5C cores. But across a variety of real-world workloads especially among creator workloads and more, this Strix Point laptop was delivering great uplift. The Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 also came in 43% faster than the current Intel competition with the Core Ultra 7 155H "Meteor Lake" processor.
Where things got really interesting with the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 was the power efficiency of this Zen 5 laptop SoC. Across the span of all the benchmarks, the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 SoC was pulling about 20.4 Watts with a peak of 34.2 Watts.... Meanwhile the Ryzen 7 7840HS had an average of 35 Watts and a peak of 60 Watts. The Ryzen 7 7840U had a 27 Watt average and a peak of 51 Watts. The Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 came out faster than those parts while consuming significantly less power. This Zen 5 power efficiency is very exciting and should carry over for desktop and server parts too. Meanwhile the Core Ultra 7 155H was consuming 29.6 Watts on average with a peak of 65 Watts.
On the power side, as mentioned I am currently running some "performance" ACPI Platform Profile tests on the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 with the ASUS Zenbook S 16 to see how much further this SoC can be pushed in this laptop at higher power... Stay tuned for those results in the next few days given the large number of benchmarks being used. For this article all laptops were in their default "balanced" platform profile configuration.
👁 AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 and AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 ASUS laptops
These initial Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 results have me super excited for Zen 5. It's different having AMD shipping their next-gen laptop SoCs ahead of the desktop processors, but in a few weeks attention will turn to the Ryzen 9000 series. I've been pushing the limits of this SoC in being eager to test Zen 5, so stay tuned for more articles ahead of the Ryzen 9000 series launch. The generational performance uplift is nice with Zen 5 but really captivating my interest has been the large power efficiency gains at least among these laptop SoCs. The Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 also furthers its lead over Intel Meteor Lake that makes an even larger hill for Lunar Lake to climb, which will be interesting to see how that battle goes later in the quarter.
To consider though is that early adopters of the Ryzen AI 300 series laptops will need to be using a very up-to-date Linux software stack for accelerated graphics, the NPU XDNA driver is still not yet in the upstream Linux kernel nor is the user-space software packaged up by various Linux distributions yet for a nice end-user experience, the single threaded / hetoergeneous core topology patches performance still is to be explored more for Strix Point with the Zen 5 and Zen 5C cores combination, and there is the RAPL Zen 5 patch not yet mainlined if you care about SoC power monitoring. But aside from that all of the AMD Zen 5 Linux essentials are in place and upstream ready for Linux use from day-one.
Thanks to AMD for sending out the ASUS Zenbook S1 6 with Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 for launch-day Linux testing on Phoronix. Stay tuned for a lot more coverage over the coming days, including from the Ryzen AI 9 365 laptop I pre-ordered. More graphics tests, more benchmarks all around, looking at different platform profile modes with the ASUS Zenbook S 16, XDNA / Ryzen AI, Windows 11 vs. Linux performance, Zen 5 vs. Zen 5C core for core comparison, and more are among the article I am working on over the coming days. I'll also have more thoughts to share on the ASUS Zenbook S 16 in particular once having more than one week's experience with it thus far but so far has been shaping up to be a nice modern laptop.
Update (29 July): The AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 review and benchmarks are now published.
If you enjoyed this article consider joining Phoronix Premium to view this site ad-free, multi-page articles on a single page, and other benefits. PayPal or Stripe tips are also graciously accepted. Thanks for your support.