If you looked at that headline and thought, "I didn't even know either of those CPUs were out yet," don't be distressed, because they aren't. While both the
Core i9-13980HX and
Ryzen 9 7845HX have been announced by their respective manufacturers, you can't actually
buy a laptop with either processor yet. Despite that, both chips are present in the Passmark database, which means you can see them ranked on the company's website.
It wasn't even a week ago that
we reported on the Ryzen 9 7845HX showing up at the very top of Passmark's laptop CPU performance chart. Its performance absolutely decimated everything else on the chart, beating Intel's Core i9-12900HX by some 45%, Apple's M2 Max by 78%, and AMD's own Ryzen 9 6900HX by an incredible 90%. To some degree, that's not totally surprising given that it's really a desktop CPU in laptop clothing.
The same can be said for Intel's Core i9-13980HX, of course. That chip is based on the same 24-core Raptor Lake silicon that goes into the company's screaming-fast Core i9-13900KS, and as a result, it could be both power-thirsty and quite warm—characteristics as likely to apply to the Ryzen 9 7845HX.
Core i9-13950HX Passmark Results w/ MSI GT77 Titan - Review Coming Soon
Regardless of its practicality as a portable CPU, there's no denying that the Core i9-13980HX just snatched the top spot in Passmark away from AMD's CPU. In fact, it outpaces the Zen 4 part by a fair margin, scoring 54,483 points in the Passmark CPUMark test. That puts it ahead of the Ryzen 9 7845HX by some 16%—particularly impressive in light of the fact that these new CPUs (including AMD's) are basically in a league of their own as far as this benchmark goes.
If we wanted to be cheeky, we could point out that a 24-core CPU beating a 16-core CPU by just 16% is actually rather poor. After all, Passmark's CPU Mark test is (like most synthetic multi-threaded CPU compute tests) unrealistically-parallel when compared to typical real-world workloads. Historically, it has favored CPUs with strong multi-core integer math performance, which is why for a long time
CPUBenchmark.net claimed that the AMD FX-8350 was faster than the Core i7-3770K.
Passmark has improved the benchmark since those days, and it correlates fairly closely with performance in similar multi-threaded tasks, like Cinebench. So saying, if you're keen to do rendering workloads on
a laptop machine, you might want to keep an eye out for a 24-core Intel CPU. We'd probably wait for reviews of such systems to see what power consumption and battery life are like first, though.