I don't think I've ever seen this before AMD is launching a new series of mobile
CPUs and the laptop they sent over is fine except that it's limited to about
half of the power of all these competing devices when you limit power you limit
performance and who in their right mind
would possibly want to Great Scott it
wins anyway that's right folks it turns out
ryzen AI 300 is so good that AMD took
the performance Crown anyway not only that but with a claimed 32% increase in
performance per watt AMD is set to absolutely Crush their longtime x86
competitor when it comes to efficiency as well of course though x86 is no
longer the only daxon in the wiener dog race a month ago qualcom came out of
absolutely nowhere and absolutely embarrassed the rest of the industry
with their onew punch of great battery life and performance is ryzen AI 300
enough to fend off the impending ARM Invasion and can I fend off this
invasion of Segways to our
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link below in front of me is the new ASUS Zenbook s16 powered by the brand
new dear Lord AMD ryzen AI 9hx
370 I'm sorry guys I mean the chip is
really good but this has to be the worst naming scheme that we've seen in years
and this is right after we just made an entire video about how AMD is
intentionally using their naming schemes to mislead their customers almost
everything else about it is great though it's built on tsmc's near Cutting Edge 4
NM node and we get an extra four cores
compared to last gen and while the base frequency is just 2 GHz this little 12
core 24 thread monster can boost up to 5.1 GHz if the power and thermals of
your laptop allow it I bring up power limits here because if you look in front
of me we've got a MacBook Pro and also three ASUS Vivo books featuring the same
50 W TDP but with three different
processors now the plan was for us to also get a Vivo book with the ryzen AI
300 but we didn't so our ryzen AI is
running at just 28 Watts so much for our
Apples to Apples Showdown and almost this entire review but then we were like
okay I mean we know this isn't a fair comparison but why don't we try it
anyway and how could this possibly
happen our ryzen AI 300 easily beats its
last generation x86 competitors and while Qualcomm appears to still be in
the lead here you got to remember that Snapdragon chip is running at 50 watts
to see how much that difference was impacting our test we got our hands on a
Dell XPS 13 that also has a 28 watt TDP
and would you look at that when matched
for power these two CPUs are darn near matched for performance as well AMD
takes a slight lead in multicore while Qualcomm edges them out in single core
but neither of these differences are the kind that you would notice in Daily
usage the same can't be said about Apple however whose last gen M3 still manages
to Gap everyone in single core performance I'm really looking forward
to M4 now keeping in mind the power disparity AMD takes a win in av1
encoding while Qualcomm edges the mountain x264 in Photoshop AMD once
again beats out everyone on Windows only to be promptly put in their place by
Apple and Adobe premere Pro is a similar story just with some of the pages ripped
out of the book because our Qualcomm device simply wouldn't open the program
helping to make AMD's case that emulation is still no substitute for
Native x86 Hardware of course these are laptop CPUs so for many of you heavy
workloads are irrelevant and all that really matters is battery life
and hot Smokies as AMD ever improved
here too our Zenbook lasted over 11 hours away from a plug now this isn't a
perfect test the Zenbook has a bit more raw battery capacity than the Vivo book
and the screen isn't the same either but those small differences cannot account
for the incredible 3our Improvement that we see over the last generation it
doesn't quite close the gap with Qualcomm but it puts AMD in the same
ballpark as Apple for the first time since the M1 and AMD has a very
compelling reason why you might Overlook any small deficiencies here and it's
gaming AMD was already in the lead for integrated graphics and I'm talking Rob
performance features driver support it's been a one wiener race effectively but
that doesn't mean they can afford to get complacent and they haven't in ryzen AI
300 we get their new rdna 3.5 architecture which takes AMD from
winning gaming to absolutely dominating
it I mean even when our Qualcomm system can launch the game which is about half
the time based on our recent test stream AMD offers up a difference in animation
smoothness and in graphical Fidelity that will be obvious to BAS basically
anyone there is an elephant in the room though a boring boring elephant you
probably noticed that the ryzen 300 name has AI shoehorned right in the middle of
it so how is it at AI well AMD is very
proud that their new npu or neural processing unit has a whopping 50 tops
that are dedicated to AI acceleration which beats qualcomm's 45
tops neat so to test it we fired up UL
prion and it didn't work so we opened up
one of Microsoft's new co-pilot plus programs and but those aren't supported
yet either no but don't worry according to AMD's notes ryzen AI processors work
great in the programs you use every day like amuse hugging face and
agentic sorry now to be clear the inclusion of
an npu is appreciated and programs that
you've heard of will surely take advantage of it someday it's just that
including it right in the middle of the product name makes it seem more
important than it is right now when it isn't even compatible enough for us to
test it and I hope that this is a trend that stops dead I mean they didn't call
the last gen ryzen av1 decode 6000
series and we didn't call this shirt screwdriver 40% polyester now available
on LTT Store.com sorry I got going on naming again didn't I I shouldn't
because there are other problems too and arguably bigger ones out of the gate
ryzen AI 300 has no support for so dim
memory that means that not only is there no way to upgrade the RAM on this laptop
there is no way for any laptop manufacturer like framework investment
disclosure to design a ryzen AI 300
laptop that can be upgraded it is
possible that they will change this in the future and I really hope they do
because I believe it would be an excellent selling point for the platform
currently qualcomm's chips have zero sodium support and rumors suggest that
Intel's upcoming lunar Lake will be the same meaning you have to pay upfront
from all three major processor vendors
for all of the memory that you plan to need laptop manufacturers love this kind
of thing but it sucks skunk juice for
consumers another thing that sucks on ryzen AI 300 is Wi-Fi AMD unfortunately
has partnered with mediatech who exclusively provides Wireless chipsets
for their devices and from our experience lately they just kind of suck
multiple members of our team including me have used AMD laptops for work over
the last couple of years and all of them have noticed problems with Wi-Fi
dropouts reconnection issues and just general flakiness this sort of thing is
hard to quantify so the best we could come up with to put a number to it is we
tested how long it takes for each of our devices to reconnect to the same Wi-Fi
access point and it turns out the AMD machines took a solid 2 seconds longer
than Intel and Qualcomm which doesn't sound like a whole lot but it's just
meant to be illustrative of how it's not quite as good of an experience and from
what I've seen that 2 seconds is far from the worst you might encounter
another thing that might or might not matter to you is webcam quality AMD is
doing okay here but they are probably a
couple of generations away from snapd Dragon's Superior image signal
processing all of which is pretty minor though compared to our last big drawback
naming again and I'm going somewhere with this right now there are only two
SKS in the ryzen AI 300 series which get 12 and 10 cores respectively but in the
past this would have been as many as six SKS with a u suffix for low power HS for
middle of the road and HX for allout
performance this told to At a Glance roughly what class of laptop you were
looking at well not anymore now a single
processor can be anywhere from 15 to 54
watts of power so unless laptop makers start publishing the power limits of the
CPUs in their designs your friend's laptop could have access to literally
3.6 times the power of yours despite
both having the exact same
name I mean we were very impressed by
the capabilities of our power limited chip enough so that we were comfortable
reviewing it against higher power chips and it still did great but we feel this
practice is unnecessarily misleading and is an ugly stain on what should
otherwise have been a total Victory lap of a launch for AMD and there's one last
catch the price we weren't able to find
any perfect Apples to Apples comparisons on price but it seems like laptops with
AMD's l latest and greatest are going to come with roughly a $100 premium over
the last gen and you can see that for yourself at the links down below this
certainly raises some questions about value for AMD with that said though
until Intel actually ships lunar Lake AMD is the only choice for laptops with
a proper GPU completely eliminating qualcom from the discussion if you need
real performance on the go at least on Windows otherwise MacBooks are still
really good if you don't game little off
award kind of like this awkward segue um
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