Just weeks after their unveiling at CES, AMD’s Ryzen 6000 Series mobile processors are poised to show up in retail laptops, challenging Intel’s latest 12th Generation (“Alder Lake”) mobile CPUs and Apple’s proprietary M1 processors with the most advanced AMD technology yet.
The last couple of years have been marked by major architecture changes in Intel and Apple processors, which means that AMD stands out by sticking with the tried and true. With no differentiated Efficiency cores or Performance cores like on Intel’s latest laptop chips, AMD’s Ryzen 9 6000 laptop CPUs combine dozens of small enhancements and optimizations to deliver better power and efficiency across all eight of their cores. AMD dubs this iteration to its architecture “Zen 3+.”
But that doesn’t mean that the latest AMD processors aren’t going to offer improved performance and power management. On the contrary, AMD has worked to squeeze more raw power out of these sixth-generation CPUs, which were code-named “Rembrandt” during development. (That’s in keeping with AMD’s recent CPU families being named after artists.) The company touts five layers of power optimization, ranging from the physical silicon to the system software. All are aimed at delivering next-generation capabilities without the need for a massive architecture change.
AMD Ryzen 6000 Process Improvements: It’s 6nm’s Time to Shine
With these new Ryzen 6000 processors for laptops, AMD has moved to a 6-nanometer (6nm) manufacturing process, which means more transistors on the chip. There are up to 13.1 billion transistors on the 210 square millimeters of silicon in the Ryzen 6000 series, up from the 10.7 billion available on the Ryzen 5000 line. We’ll be testing the Ryzen 9 6900HS below, third down in the new Ryzen 6000 stack, which comprises both high-power H-series and lower-power U-series CPUs…
You can see more about the full new Ryzen 6000 mobile-chip lineup in our launch article from CES 2022.
The new process doesn’t just allow the company to design smaller chips with more transistors. It means those parts deliver more efficient operation. Smaller sizes mean less power leakage, letting the new chips squeeze more processing muscle out of the same power levels. AMD claims a 30% increase in overall speed and performance over last year’s 7nm Ryzen 5000 series.
Intel, meanwhile, has stopped using the nanometer metric altogether to describe the process technology for its chips, and both Apple and Intel have embraced new technologies that make the simple measurement less of a clear-cut performance indicator. That said, because AMD is using an updated version of existing architecture, the move to 6nm does signal improvements in power and performance over its previous 7nm chips.
The Focus: Fine-Tuning for Power Savings
While the overall chip architecture iterates on the existing Zen 3 model, the microarchitecture of individual cores and the power-delivery systems have all gotten improvements. The broad details look nearly identical to last year’s Zen 3 line, with the Ryzen 9 5000 offering eight full cores with 16 processing threads, backed by a 16MB L3 cache and 128-bit-wide memory.
But other things have changed, like the addition of RDNA 2, bringing more of AMD’s powerful graphics capabilities to systems that aren’t equipped with a dedicated GPU. With 12 compute units on the chip, the graphics improvements alone are impressive—you can even get ray tracing without a discrete graphics solution.
Aside from graphics, the overall layout of the mobile CPU is largely unchanged, hence the Zen 3+ moniker, indicating an iterative update to last year’s Zen 3 chips. There are some changes, such as an expanded array of memory controllers. They now use a dual-channel design with two subchannels, offering the same 128 bits, but broken up into four x32 channels for DDR5 and LPDDR5 support.
The other notable change to the chip’s topology is the addition of a Microsoft Pluton processor (for current Windows security requirements) and a more advanced display controller, which adds support for advanced display-output standards, such as HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 2, on up to four screens.
Functional changes ramp up the efficiency, as well. The chip can transition to deeper sleep states with faster sleep and wake times. Initialization times are sped up by skipping the power-down/power-up process used by the L3 cache, while a new “dirtiness counter” monitors that cache to determine when it needs to be cycled down to recover.
But it’s more than just chip-level changes. New sleep states also let the processor scale back the power, even dropping cores into momentary sleep states as needed, to provide small power savings throughout operational use. For example, stop scrolling on a web page, and the associated process will downshift until it’s needed again.
Even the display capabilities have gotten this granular power management, by introducing the ability to refresh portions of the display instead of the full screen with every change. Instead of refreshing the empty margins of a document, the processor can now tell the display to refresh only the portions with text, or sections of a webpage instead of the full screen.
AMD says that it has implemented 50 of these new power optimizations, having an impact on everything from fan noise to battery life. The result is faster wake times and enhanced allocation of memory bandwidth and processing threads. Hardware-accelerated low-power modes let you enjoy uninterrupted use while letting your laptop keep power draw to a minimum.
Finally, the new CPUs offer a broader continuum of power and efficiency. Instead of standardized power modes that let you opt for either quiet, energy-efficient operation or a performance-focused mode that throttles up the cooling fans and chews through the battery, the power management offered on the new Ryzen 9 is more granular. It takes into account several internal inputs, like laptop skin temperature, power trajectory, firmware performance indicators, and workload type, then adjusts the balance dynamically.
As with the architecture tweaks, these are subtle-yet-sophisticated refinements. It all adds up to a CPU that can deliver more processing power while consuming less battery power. It’s a very different approach than the two-tier processing solutions embraced by Apple and Intel, but it’s a compelling one. And while the promise of better battery life and brawny processing muscle is still there, the question lingers: Can the Ryzen 6000 line deliver well enough to take on Intel and Apple?
AMD Ryzen 6000: Stepping Up With a New Platform
AMD has also upgraded the feature set for its latest CPUs, offering a full platform refresh for 2022. The Zen 3+ processors support new features, notably USB 4 and PCI Express Gen 4, a full upgrade to DDR5 and LPDDR5 memory, and improved wireless connectivity with Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E support, along with Bluetooth 5.2.
One interesting note: At the time of our discussions with AMD, the chips weren’t yet certified for Thunderbolt 4, but with 40GBps bandwidth on USB 4, it should meet the spec requirements handily, and AMD expects full certification soon.
And, as expected for a company that’s as much about graphics as it is CPU power, the new Ryzen chips offer improved display support. We’ve already touched on the addition of RDNA 2 to the integrated graphics, as well as support for up to four external displays, but on top of those headlining features, the display output from Ryzen 6000 has full AMD FreeSync and HDR Pipeline support.
All told, it’s a major upgrade in what the processors can do, ushering in all of the latest connectivity and technology options that manufacturers and users expect from a current platform.
Meet the Competition: AMD vs. Intel vs. Apple
To test the new Ryzen 6000 laptop processors, we used a retail-ready sample of the latest Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 provided by Intel, outfitted with an AMD Ryzen 9 6900HS processor and dedicated Radeon RX 6800S graphics. Asus pegs the MSRP of this configuration at $2,499. We’ve put the laptop through our full assortment of benchmark tests, giving us hard data to go with AMD’s claims of improved power usage and processing oomph.
To see how well it stacks up against other options on the market, we compared the system with a handful of laptops that use last year’s top AMD processors, as well as Intel and Apple systems that use Intel’s top-tier 11th and 12th Generation laptop CPUs and Apple’s M1 Max processor.
The biggest question with any new processor is how much better it really is, both in terms of improvements year-over-year, but also how it compares with the competition. Here are the systems we compared it with for this initial round of testing…
Especially when comparing with the likes of the MSI GE76 Raider that we used to test the Intel Core i9-12900HK processor, it’s important to note that these are all very different machines. The MSI is a chunky 17-inch gaming rig, with significantly more room for air flow and cooling vents than the current version of the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 we used to test the AMD Ryzen 9 6900HS processor. The Asus laptop is thinner and smaller overall, creating a different thermal environment than bigger notebooks—it’s closer in most respects to the Apple MacBook Pro 14-inch, but it’s still a rough comparison. Complicating things further, the Zephyrus introduces a new liquid metal cooling element that wasn’t present on last year’s model.
It’s not even the same wattage as the Intel and Apple processors we’ve stacked it up against, with AMD’s Ryzen 6900HS a lower-wattage CPU (at 35 watts) than other recent flagship processors. Also note that while we got a Ryzen 9 6900HS model, AMD will offer three slightly upticked Ryzen 9 chips, as well, presumably to be used in larger, more ventilated chassis designs that are closer to the GE76 Raider than the ROG Zephyrus G14 is. (Some are designated 35 watt, some 45 watt-plus.) So there is likely some room for improvement over our 35-watt Ryzen 9 sample’s performance in the overall Ryzen 9 6000 line.
That’s all a long way of saying that these aren’t one-to-one comparisons. Perfect comparisons aren’t really an option. Regardless of these non-trivial differences, we can still see some clear patterns in our test data that speak to the processor capability beyond the additional complicating factors of wattage and cooling.
Test Results: Productivity and Content Creation
Let’s start with the basics, looking at our standard productivity and content creation tests.
We’ll dig into the results of each test individually, but the big picture here is that AMD is definitely in the race, although it’s not leading the pack the way Apple and Intel have been. But context is still important here. While this new AMD CPU might not beat out the top Intel and Apple chips in every comparison shown here, it’s worth remembering that these are still some of the best performance numbers you’ll find in any laptop. It’s only in comparing the best of the best that the Ryzen 9 9600HS falls even slightly behind its high-performance peers.
PCMark 10
To simulate real-world productivity, we turn to UL’s PCMark 10 productivity suite, which measures overall system performance in tasks like word processing, web browsing, and videoconferencing.
And here, we get our first taste of the performance offered by the new CPU. The AMD-equipped Asus Zephyrus handily beat both the AMD-powered Lenovo Legion 7 Gen 6 (6,981) and the 2021 Asus Zephyrus G14 model (6,679), showing a major improvement year-over-year. And anything in the 7,000 range is impressive, beating out almost every system we’ve seen in the last 12 months. But the 12th Generation Intel processor in the MSI GE76 Raider did better (7,585), and the older 11th Generation CPU used in the Lenovo Legion 7i Gen 6 (7,850) did even better.
Cinebench R23
Next, we use Maxon’s Cinebench R23 to measure pure processing performance, putting the chip through a 10-minute stress test in which the multi-core CPU is used to render an image over and over again. The test favors processors with more cores and threads, and the final number is a good measure of total processor capability.
With a score of 12,635, the AMD Ryzen 9 6900HS delivers some of the best performance we’ve ever seen, edging ahead of almost every model we compared it with. But it’s not the best score in our records—that honor goes to the Intel Core i9-12900HK “Alder Lake” processor we tested a few weeks ago, which notched an astonishing 16,259 points in the same test.
Geekbench 5.4.1 Pro
In Primate Labs’ Geekbench Pro, we measure multicore processing in tasks like PDF rendering, speech recognition, and machine learning. The AMD produced, again, impressive results, scoring 9,925 points. That easily tops other high-performance systems, like the Alienware m17 R4 (8,147), the 2021 Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 (8,352), and both the Intel and AMD versions of the powerhouse Lenovo Legion 7 Gen 6, scoring 9,745 and 8,386, respectively.
But that’s still not enough to claim top performance, as it fell to third place behind the impressive Apple MacBook Pro 16-Inch (12,759) and the category-leading MSI Raider with 12th Generation Intel Core i9 processing (13,506).
Handbrake 1.4
Then came a curveball. While we consistently saw solid (though often third-place) performance in most of the above tests, things were quite different when we ran it through our Handbrake video transcode test. This test uses CPU power to re-encode a 12-minute 4K H.264 video file down to 1080p.
Here, the AMD’s eight-core, 16-thread processor should have delivered a competitively short transcode time, and what we got wasn’t terrible. At 5 minutes and 50 seconds, it’s better than 90 of the last 100 laptops we’ve tested, and any result under 6 minutes is impressive. It beats last year’s Ryzen 5000-powered Zephyrus (6:00) as well as the Intel-powered Alienware m17 R4 (7:00).
But the top performers led by a large margin. The Intel 12th Generation MSI GE76 Raider (4:42) and the Apple MacBook Pro 16-Inch (4:49) both did it more than a full minute faster than our test unit.
Test Results: Adobe Creative Suite
To see how AMD’s new CPU handles content creation, we turned to two popular applications from Adobe to test the new hardware in photo and video editing.
Adobe Photoshop 22 CC
Using Photoshop Creative Cloud 22 and workstation maker Puget Systems‘ PugetBench testing extension, we tested the photo editing chops of the AMD Ryzen 9 6900HS. This test measures performance as the system runs a script of filters and editing tasks to an image, measuring how well it handles one of the most common performance-focused tasks of an average PC user.
Here, the 3.3GHz processor gets to benefit from the accompanying AMD Radeon RX 6800S graphics that’s in our Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 test unit. Photoshop is a far more holistic test, drawing on everything from CPU and GPU performance to storage speeds and memory allotment. With everything brought to bear on the test, the Ryzen 9 6900HS Asus Zephyrus scored an impressive 1,022 points, putting it head-and-shoulders above almost every machine from the last year.
But it doesn’t top everything. Sure, it edged ahead of the Apple MacBook Pro 16-Inch (858) and the AMD-based Lenovo Legion 7 Gen 6 (944), but it fell behind the Intel variant of the Lenovo (1,083) and was trounced by the 12th Generation Intel Core i9 of the MSI GE76 Raider (1,192).
Adobe Premiere Pro 15 CC
The other Adobe test we use is Adobe Premiere Pro 15 CC, again, with the help of a PugetBench extension. This time, the test involves video editing, and stresses the whole system, performing live playback and file export with several codecs at 4K and 8K resolutions, as well as special-effects sequences that stress the CPU and GPU beyond normal operations. Anyone who has tried to edit video knows how limiting even expensive hardware can be, so a better score indicates not only great performance, but better-than-average capability for the most demanding tasks.
It’s a test we often skip entirely, simply because most machines can’t do it. The Ryzen 9 not only handled the test, it scored an admirable 550 points, one of the best scores we’ve seen and a clear indicator that the well-appointed Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 can definitely be used for more advanced content creation.
But, again, it’s not the leader in this test. That honor goes to the Intel Core i9 MSI Raider, which scored 771 points.
AMD on Home Turf: Graphics Testing
One area where we expected AMD to truly excel was gaming. As AMD is the company that powers the latest generation of game consoles and countless desktop rigs with its graphics cards, we had every reason to expect great things from the Zephyrus G14, which is armed with both a Ryzen 9 6900HS processor and an AMD Radeon RX 6800S GPU.
We run two 3DMark tests on pretty much every machine that comes into PC Labs: 3DMark Night Raid and 3DMark Time Spy. UL’s 3DMark includes DirectX 12 testing and a mix of high- and low-end testing, with Time Spy being best suited to high-end PCs with discrete GPUs and Night Raid being more focused on integrated graphics.
While the AMD-powered gaming laptop certainly offered up great gaming capability, we didn’t see the category-leading numbers we had hoped for. Instead, it was the same song we heard with all of our performance tests. The double barrels of the AMD CPU and GPU offered great performance in the big-picture sense, but even doubling up failed to give the AMD-powered system an edge over the latest Intel release, which was paired with Nvidia graphics hardware and allowed to flex in a much bigger chassis.
In our standard graphics tests, using 3DMark, the Zephyrus G14, with its doubled-up AMD hardware, scored better than last year’s model, racking up 8,645 points in Time Spy and 45,737 points in Night Raid. But that year-over-year improvement still didn’t translate into any sort of lead over the competing Intel and Nvidia systems, which were led by the likes of the Lenovo Legion 7i Gen 6 and MSI GE76 Raider with Intel 12th Generation.
The key difference with the biggest impact on these scores, of course, is the GPU paired with any given processor. While CPU performance will affect these numbers to an extent, the graphics hardware will obviously play a much larger role in render quality and frame rates, so this isn’t strictly a reflection of the new processor. Given that four of the systems in our charts employed GeForce RTX 3080 or 3080 Ti solutions, the contours of that comparison should be clear.
AMD vs. Intel vs. Apple Silicon: What About Wattage?
The other big question mark for the latest round of processors has been power usage. With the addition of dedicated efficiency cores on both Intel 12th Generation and Apple Silicon chips, the performance per watt of these new processors has gotten more scrutiny than ever before, and with good reason. High power draws may not be a big issue for stationary desktops, but in a high-performance laptop, you expect to be able to take that performance to go. A system that only produces great performance while sucking down lots of power means that all of your expensive processing power comes with disappointingly short battery life.
In our recent look at how Intel and Apple CPUs compared in power use, we tested the systems in Cinebench and Handbrake, using a Kill-A-Watt meter to measure the wattage drawn over wall power. Wattage was measured throughout each test run and averaged between the highest and lowest recorded readings.
A quick glance at the numbers reveals everything you need to know—the AMD averaged 93.9 watts when running Handbrake in High Performance mode, which is lower than the Intel’s 126.5 watts, but higher than the Apple M1 Max’s 59.5 watts.
Similar results were seen in Cinebench, where the AMD’s 78.6 watts fell neatly in between the Intel Core i9’s 115.7 watts and the MacBook Pro’s 55 watts.
In terms of power and efficiency, Apple is still the current champ, and Intel looks to be driving its performance supremacy by pulling in more power from the get-go. That makes the AMD Ryzen 9 6900HS an interesting third option that doesn’t use as much power, but doesn’t reach the same performance highs, either.
But one additional test reveals something important. Despite the clear increase in capability over the previous AMD generation, the newest AMD Ryzen 9 6900HS doesn’t seem to have reduced the battery life of the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 laptop at all.
Last year’s model clocked in at an impressive 10 hours and 9 minutes of battery life in our video rundown test. This new Zephyrus G14, which includes the Ryzen 9 6900HS processor, AMD Radeon RX 6800S GPU, and a slew of new features, clocks in at a nearly identical 10:08. And that’s with a larger display, better test results across the board, and even a brighter version of Asus’ gaudy AniMe Matrix LED lightshow on the lid (pictured above). All of that resulted in just a one-minute difference in battery life.
It’s not as headline-ready as the performance claims of Intel or the efficiency claims of Apple, but it’s an impressive achievement, all the same.
Verdict: Third Place Is Still on the Podium
It’s easy to look over these test numbers and comparisons and think that AMD has somehow failed, or fallen behind the competition in terms of pure processing capability and power efficiency. And in some respects, that’s not wrong—Intel has snagged the performance crown for the moment (albeit in a much bigger, more ventilated chassis), and Apple is offering substantially better energy efficiency than anything else on the market right now.
But we’re still talking about one of the most powerful processors you can buy. The latest AMD CPUs deliver a solid improvement over the previous generation, and they do it with a reasonable level of power draw.
With the Winter Olympics going on, it’s hard not to turn to a sports metaphor, but this one’s pretty applicable. AMD may have taken home the bronze medal of the moment, but that still makes the Ryzen 9 6900HS one of the best in the world. And in the face of major innovations from Apple and Intel, AMD’s stayed in the race without adopting an all-new architecture, or sacrificing any of the features we expect from a modern platform in 2022. Third place on this podium is still a pretty good place to be.
