We had to wait quite a while but we finally got our hands on AMD’s latest mobile processors from the Ryzen 6000U generation. We compare the Zen3+ cores of the new Ryzen 7 6800U with Intel’s current Alder Lake-P platform as well as Apple’s M1 Pro SoCs. Who builds the best chip for compact laptops?
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This talks about the efficiency of the 6800u.
"The efficiency advantage of the new Ryzen 7 6800U over the current Alder Lake models is much bigger in multi-core tests and contrary to the single-core tests, there is no real performance advantage anymore, either. Even the Core i7-1260P with a much higher power consumption is just slightly ahead in the benchmarks and our results once again show how inefficient Alder Lake is at higher consumption values. The Core i5-1240P in the Yoga Slim 7 Pro consumes much more power than the Core i7-1260P in the Yoga 9i 14, but this is hardly noticeable in the performance.
It is also interesting to see how Alder Lake-P chips perform at lower power levels when the cooling performance is limited. This is the case for the Samsung Galaxy Book 2 Pro 13, where the CPU is quickly limited to just 20W. The efficiency increase is very small compared to the gains we saw for the Ryzen 7 6800U at 12W, which means Intel’s hybrid architecture with the 10 nm cores is not really suited for very compact systems. These are not good news for the upcoming Alder Lake-U CPUs, which are positioned in the 15W class. However, Intel still lists a maximum consumption of 55W, even though these chips are only equipped with 2 P-cores. Based on our results so far, we do not believe the Alder Lake-U systems will be very competitive, neither in terms of performance, nor efficiency.
The new AMD Ryzen 7 6800U leaves a very good impression so far. The single-core performance is not as good as on the new Alder Lake chips, but the multi-core performance is comparable and the new Ryzen CPU is way more efficient. AMD also managed to improve the integrated GPU, but we will take a closer look at the new RDNA2 GPU in a separate article.
We expect more laptops with Ryzen 6000U CPUs in the next couple of weeks and the real rivals for the 6000U models, the Alder Lake-U chips like the Core i7-1265U, should be available in a few weeks as well. They use a similar hybrid architecture as other Alder Lake chips, but with fewer P-cores. Intel still lists a maximum consumption of 55W, which worries us a bit. The high consumption values do not only result in shorter battery runtimes (even with simple workloads), but we also observed more frequent fan activity in our reviews so far.
Based on our results so far, the AMD Ryzen 6000U chips are the best mobile processors for Windows laptops right now. The big question is if manufacturers will use the AMD chips for their premium laptops and if they will be available in larger quantities, where Intel has an advantage right now."