AMD’s Mobile Revival: Redefining the Notebook Business with the Ryzen 9 4900HS (A Review)

CPU Benchmarks

Comparison of these two CPUs is going to be interesting. Both laptops being tested excel in different ways:

The ASUS device has more cores, and by the looks of our testing, actually turbos to a higher frequency, regardless of the sticker on the box. We’ve already shown that AMD’s Zen 2 can have comparable if not better IPC than Intel’s Coffee Lake refresh, so add that to the more cores, should put every test in AMD’s camp.

What should benefit Intel here is the on-box TDP, of 45 W, compared to the AMD 35 W. When we fired up our usual program for monitoring Intel frequencies, it showed that there is a hard coded BIOS boost up to 60 W, which we thought should give some extra power. However, when the system was actually set to a workload, the peak turbo power was only 45 W, which the system was able to keep for 10-15 seconds. Then it sat back at 35 W, which makes it in line with AMD. This is odd performance from the Intel CPU, however we assume at this level that Razer has made the decisions in order to fit within the thermal profile of the Blade 15 chassis.

If Intel has a lower frequency, fewer cores, and a lower frequency, all for the same power envelope as AMD, then it looks like a slam dunk for AMD.

It is. These systems are built with productivity in mind, and even with benchmarks that are bursty like PCMark, AMD takes the win.

I also took some time to run the Civ 6 AI benchmarks, which performs 10 turns of a late game and averages the turn time. Intel won this test, but I performed it again with the power unplugged and on battery saver mode in Windows. The results were reversed:

This led me to do some more tests without power connected. I’ve separated these out into a different page, combining some CPU and some GPU data.