AMD’s Ryzen 8040 Crushes Intel Core Ultra in AI Benchmarks, Radeon 780M Shines in Games
In December, AMD announced its XDNA-based Ryzen 8040 series of APUs as part of its “Hawk Point” lineup, focusing on on-device AI. Now, at CES, the company has showcased some performance metrics, particularly comparing them with the likes of Intel’s Meteor Lake lineup.
Laptops powered by the Ryzen 8040 series of APUs are slated to be released in Q1 2023, particularly at the beginning of February. Across the lineup, they feature Zen4 CPU cores and built-in Radeon 700 series graphics.
AMD’s 8040 Beats Intel Core Ultra by Up to 79% in Four Different genAI Video Models
At CES, AMD compared its “AI” 8040 series with Intel’s Core Ultra lineup, testing them against each other in multiple AI benchmarks. In four different video models, namely MobileNetv3, ESRGAN, Yolov8, and Deeplabv3, AMD seemed to pull ahead of the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H, with up to 79% improved performance, as shown in the charts below.
The 8040 series improves upon the 7040 series of APUs, thanks to higher NPU clocks, despite using the same XDNA architecture. Please note that XDNA 2 will arrive later this year as part of AMD’s “Strix Point” lineup.
The 8840U Edges Out Core Ultra 7 155H in Content Creation AI Benchmarks, Up to 85% Better Performance in Davinci Resolve
The Core Ultra 7 155H, when compared to the Ryzen 7 8840U, appeared to struggle in tests involving Stable Diffusion, however, the gap wasn’t that all too big, with Ryzen taking the lead by only 0.6%. On the other hand, in Davinci Resolve, when testing the AI-based video upscaling feature, the 8840U outperformed the Ultra 7 155H by almost 85%.
While these results highlight AMD’s performance leadership, it remains to be seen how these chips will fare in real-world testing. Most of the benchmarks and applications showcased were very specific scenarios, and the performance gap may become clearer once consumers have the opportunity to test these chips in about a month.
Radeon 780M Performs Better than Intel Arc (Meteor Lake) in 7 Popular Titles
While most of the debate circling the 8040U series of chipsets revolved around their nearly identical performance to their predecessors, AMD’s shining moment came with the upgrades in graphics, particularly the Radeon 780M series.
The company showcased the performance of the 8840U with Radeon 780M in seven popular titles—League of Legends, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Hitman 3, Borderlands 3, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, World of Tanks, and Far Cry 6—where it outperformed the Arc on Core Ultra 7 155H, boasting up to a 60% performance gap.
Although this data-centric briefing focused on specific comparisons, even if AMD surpasses the competition, it will need to ensure adequate compatibility for consumers in most areas. This is why the support for Ryzen AI by Hugging Face, OpenAI, Meta, Oracle, and Microsoft seemed like an encouraging sign moving forward.
This is all we know for now, but we will keep you updated as new information becomes available when laptops powered by the Ryzen 8040 series release later this year.
