AMD's Ryzen 7 8840U Benchmarks Show Hawk Point Beating Meteor Lake In AI, Games And More
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.
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.