New AI Processor Benchmarks Emerge
New benchmarks have surfaced comparing the performance of four recent AI-centric processors: the AI 9 HX 470, Ultra 7 358H, Z2 Extreme, and 258V. The comparison provides an early look at the competitive landscape for 2026, evaluating the chips on metrics relevant for both high-end cloud inference and cost-sensitive enterprise workloads.
- The AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, part of the "Strix Point" family, features 12 CPU cores (4 Zen 5 and 8 Zen 5c), 24 threads, and can boost up to 5.1 GHz. It is built on a 4nm process from TSMC. - Intel's "Lunar Lake" Core Ultra 9 288V processor has 8 cores and trades blows with the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 in single-core performance but lags in multi-core benchmarks due to having fewer cores. - The Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 includes a new XDNA 2 neural engine capable of 50 TOPS (Trillions of Operations per Second), contributing to a total system performance of up to 80 TOPS for AI tasks. Intel's Lunar Lake NPU is rated for up to 48 TOPS. - For integrated graphics, the AMD processor includes the Radeon 890M with 16 RDNA 3+ compute units, which shows significantly stronger performance in gaming benchmarks compared to Intel's integrated solution. Intel's Lunar Lake features new Xe2-LPG "Battlemage" graphics architecture. - In early benchmarks, the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 has shown a performance lead over the Intel Core Ultra 9 185H, being around 20% faster in multi-threaded tests and more power-efficient. At lower power limits (35W), the AMD processor has demonstrated a more significant performance advantage. - The competitive landscape for AI PCs in 2024 also includes Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite, which has been shown to have lower performance in some gaming comparisons against both the latest AMD and Intel offerings. - Both AMD's "Strix Point" and Intel's "Lunar Lake" processors represent a significant push towards on-device AI acceleration, with Microsoft setting a minimum of 40 TOPS from a Neural Processing Unit (NPU) for its "AI PC" designation. - AMD's Ryzen AI 300 series was officially unveiled at Computex 2024, with laptops featuring these processors beginning to roll out. Intel's Lunar Lake processors were formally launched on September 3, 2024.
