AMD Ryzen AI 9 300 Reports a 20% Gain in Performance Compared to Previous Generation CPU and Graphics

According to a leak by Golden Pig Upgrade, the top-spec AMD Ryzen AI 9 300 series “Strix Point” processor, the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, is anticipated to produce 20% better performance than its predecessor, the Ryzen 9 8945HS “Hawk Point,” on both the CPU and integrated graphics fronts. Regarding processing power, the HX 370 boasts a 12-core/24-thread CPU that combines four “Zen 5” and eight “Zen 5c” cores. Together with faster clock speeds, the “Zen 5” microarchitecture’s generational IPC rise accounts for the single-thread performance advantages, while the addition of more cores accounts for the multithreaded performance gains. The 50% increase in core count is not accompanied by a linear scaling of this performance gain.

When it comes to “Hawk Point,” all eight cores are “Zen 4,” meaning they can boost to high frequencies. Two of these cores are designated as CPPC favored cores, meaning they can boost to the highest frequencies. On “Strix Point,” however, eight cores are “Zen 5c,” which don’t boost as high, and just four cores are based on the “Zen 5” design and can boost to high frequency bands. Even though “Zen 5c” has the same IPC as “Zen 5,” because it doesn’t boost as much, the generational multithreaded performance gain from the core-count increase is anticipated to be closer to 20%. Golden Pig Upgrade claims that “Hawk Point” will score about 16000 points on Cinebench R23 nT.

Graphics provide interest to the situation. Unlike the “Hawk Point,” which has 12 compute units (CU), the new RDNA 3.5 iGPU on “Strix Point” has 16 CU. Although there are many other factors that determine graphics performance besides CU count, Golden Pig Upgrade expects a 20% improvement in graphics performance, which should make the new iGPU beat the Intel Arc Xe-LPG graphics of Core Ultra “Meteor Lake” processors by at least 20%. These 16 CU work out to 1,024 stream processors, a 33% increase over the 768 stream processors of “Hawk Point.” In its product presentation slide, AMD asserted a 36% advantage in graphics performance over the Core Ultra 9 185H processor’s Arc Graphics iGPU.

Regarding the NPU, AMD has already said that it can achieve 50 TOPS in AI inferencing, which is far higher than the 40 TOPS needed to meet Microsoft’s Copilot+ AI PC program requirements. Windows need this level of NPU speed in order to operate local Copilot sessions, reducing back-and-forth from the Cloud and enhancing privacy.