AMD has shared the first official benchmarks comparing the company’s Hawk Point APUs to Intel’s Meteor Lake chips, and apparently Hawk Point is the big winner by a wide margin. AMD tested its flagship Ryzen 7 8840U to Intel’s Core Ultra 7 155H, and claims victories in basically every single metric. With all kinds of first-party benchmarks however, we obviously can’t take them completely at face value, but they are interesting to consider.
That AMD claims such a big lead is a little surprising, considering Hawk Point is fundamentally identical to last year’s Phoenix APUs, with the only difference being a 60% faster neural processing unit (NPU). By contrast, Meteor Lake represents a big technological leap for Intel as it features tiles for the first time in a consumer CPU, the Intel 4 process, and AI-accelerated hardware.
Although companies tend to cherry pick benchmarks to show for these kinds of comparisons, AMD has truly prepared an onslaught of data to show off here. Of particular note for AI workloads is the 79% lead the 8840U has over the 155H in Deeplabv3 and the 85% margin in DaVinci Resolve.
These losses in
AI might really sting for Intel, which struggled to get Meteor Lake out the door for years; meanwhile AMD essentially overclocked Phoenix and called it a day. For the burgeoning world of
AI, it’s concerning for Meteor Lake. Though again, these are AMD’s figures and not ours.
The bars continue into gaming, where AMD holds roughly a 25% to 30% lead in seven games at 1080p. Significantly improved graphics performance was also a big selling point of Meteor Lake, but according to AMD the Radeon 780M still reigns supreme. The 780M was also present in the Ryzen 7000 series, meaning Intel could be a generation behind still.
Of course, things aren’t any better for Intel in these CPU-bound benchmarks either, based on AMD’s own testing. At this point, the 155H hasn’t won a single benchmark. Yes, this is where we feign shock, though it’s notable that it’s not like AMD never shows itself losing here and there in these kinds of presentations.
To cap it all off, AMD says the 8840U is nearly twice as efficient as the 155H. Again, that’s not great for Intel, as AMD is still on TSMC’s 4nm node while Meteor Lake represents Intel’s success in finally getting its Intel 4 process in working order. As far as we can tell, these two chips are also at the same TDP, so the result is technically fair from that aspect.
According to the footnotes in the presentation, AMD tested a reference Hawk Point laptop against MSI’s Prestige AI Evo, which we actually happen to have reviewed. It’s worth noting that the Core Ultra 7 165H inside the Prestige AI actually won quite a few tests against the Z1 Extreme, which is functionally identical to the Ryzen 7 7840U and by extension the 8840U for non-AI workloads. Though, even with lots of data massaging, it still might be true that Hawk Point is significantly better than Meteor Lake, but we’ll reserve judgement until we can test it all ourselves.
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