I don't think I've ever seen this before. AMD is launching a new series of mobile CPUs, and the laptop they sent over is fine, except that it's limited to about half of the power of all these competing devices. When you limit power, you limit performance, and who in their right mind would possibly want to? Great Scott, it wins anyway. That's right, folks. It turns out Ryzen AI 300 is so good that AMD took the performance Crown anyway. Not only that, but with a claimed 32% increase in performance per watt, AMD is set to absolutely crush their longtime x86 competitor when it comes to efficiency. Of course, though, x86 is no longer the only daxon in the wiener dog race. A month ago, Qualcomm came out of absolutely nowhere and absolutely embarrassed the rest of the industry with their one punch of great battery life and performance. Is Ryzen AI 300 enough to fend off the impending arm Invasion, and can I fend off this invasion of Segways to our

sponsor build Redux get into the world of PC gaming the easy way with build Redux. Pick your games, see the performance, and they'll put everything together for you. They love doing it, and they love you. Check them out using the link below. In front of me is the new Asus Zenbook s16 powered by the brand new dear Lord AMD Ryzen 9 HX 370. I'm sorry, guys, I mean the chip is really good, but this has to be the worst naming scheme that we've seen in years. And this is right after we just made an entire video about how AMD is intentionally using their naming schemes to mislead their customers. Almost everything else about it is great though. It's built on TSMC's near Cutting Edge 4 NM node, and we get an extra four cores compared to last gen. And while the base frequency is just 2 GHz, this little 12 core 24 thread monster can boost up to 5.1 GHz if the power and thermals of your laptop allow it. I bring up power

limits here because if you look in front of me, we've got a MacBook Pro and also three Asus VivoBooks featuring the same 50 W TDP, but with three different processors. Now the plan was for us to also get a VivoBook with the Ryzen 9 3000, but we didn't, so our Ryzen 9 is running at just 28 Watts. So much for our Apples-to-Apples Showdown and almost this entire review. But then we were like, okay, I mean, we know this isn't a fair comparison, but why don't we try it anyway? And how could this possibly happen? Our Ryzen 9 3000 easily beats its last generation x86 competitors, and while Qualcomm appears to still be in the lead here, you've got to remember that Snapdragon chip is running at 50 watts. To see how much that difference was impacting our test, we got our hands on a Dell XPS 13 that also has a 28 watt TDP. And would you look at that? When matched for power, these two CPUs are darn near

matched for performance as well. AMD takes a slight lead in multicore, while Qualcomm edges them out in single core. But neither of these differences are the kind that you would notice in daily usage. The same can't be said about Apple, however, whose last-gen M3 still manages to gap everyone in single-core performance. I'm really looking forward to M4 now. Keeping in mind the power disparity, AMD takes a win in AV1 encoding, while Qualcomm edges the mountain x264 in Photoshop. AMD once again beats out everyone on Windows, only to be promptly put in their place by Apple. Adobe Premiere Pro is a similar story, just with some of the pages ripped out of the book because our Qualcomm device simply wouldn't open the program, helping to make AMD's case that emulation is still no substitute for native x86 hardware. Of course, these are laptop CPUs, so for many of you, heavy workloads are irrelevant, and all that really matters is battery life and hot Smokies. As AMD ever improved here too, our Zenbook lasted over 11

hours away from a plug now. This isn't a perfect test. The Zenbook has a bit more raw battery capacity than the VivoBook, and the screen isn't the same either, but those small differences cannot account for the incredible 3-hour improvement that we see over the last generation. It doesn't quite close the gap with Qualcomm, but it puts AMD in the same ballpark as Apple for the first time since the M1. AMD has a very compelling reason why you might overlook any small deficiencies here, and it's gaming. AMD was already in the lead for integrated graphics, and I'm talking robust performance features, driver support. It's been a one-winner race effectively, but that doesn't mean they can afford to get complacent, and they haven't. In Ryzen AI 300, we get their new RDNA 3.5 architecture, which takes AMD from winning gaming to absolutely dominating it. I mean, even when our Qualcomm system can launch the game, which is about half the time based on our recent test stream.

AMD offers up a difference in animation smoothness and in graphical fidelity that will be obvious to basically anyone. There is an elephant in the room, though, a boring, boring elephant. You probably noticed that the Ryzen 3000 name has AI shoehorned right in the middle of it. So, how is it at AI? Well, AMD is very proud that their new NPU, or Neural Processing Unit, has a whopping 50 TOPS that are dedicated to AI acceleration, which beats Qualcomm's 45 TOPS. Neat! So, to test it, we fired up UL Proion, and it didn't work. So, we opened up one of Microsoft's new Co-Pilot Plus programs, but those aren't supported yet either. No, but don't worry. According to AMD's notes, Ryzen AI processors work great in the programs you use every day like Amuse, Hugging Face, and Agentic. Sorry, now to be clear, the inclusion of an NPU is appreciated, and programs that you've heard of will surely take advantage of it someday. It's just that

including it right in the middle of the product name makes it seem more important than it is right now. When it isn't even compatible enough for us to test it, and I hope that this is a trend that stops dead. I mean they didn't call the last-gen Ryzen AV1 decode 6000 series, and we didn't call this shirt screwdriver 40% polyester. Now available on LTT store.com. Sorry, I got going on naming again, didn't I? I shouldn't because there are other problems too, and arguably bigger ones. Out of the gate, Ryzen AI 300 has no support for SO-DIMM memory. That means that not only is there no way to upgrade the RAM on this laptop, there is no way for any laptop manufacturer like Framework Investment Disclosure to design a Ryzen AI 300 laptop that can be upgraded. It is possible that they will change this in the future, and I really hope they do because I believe it would be an excellent selling point for the platform. Currently, Qualcomm's chips have zero

sodium support and rumors suggest that Intel's upcoming lunar Lake will be the same. Meaning you have to pay upfront from all three major processor vendors for all of the memory that you plan to need. Laptop manufacturers love this kind of thing, but it sucks skunk juice for consumers. Another thing that sucks on ryzen AI 300 is Wi-Fi. AMD, unfortunately, has partnered with mediatech who exclusively provides Wireless chipsets for their devices and from our experience lately they just kind of suck. Multiple members of our team, including me, have used AMD laptops for work over the last couple of years and all of them have noticed problems with Wi-Fi dropouts, reconnection issues, and just general flakiness. This sort of thing is hard to quantify, so the best we could come up with to put a number to it is we tested how long it takes for each of our devices to reconnect to the same Wi-Fi access point, and it turns out the AMD machines took a solid 2 seconds longer than Intel and Qualcomm, which doesn't

sound like a whole lot, but it's just meant to be illustrative of how it's not quite as good of an experience. And from what I've seen, that 2 seconds is far from the worst you might encounter. Another thing that might or might not matter to you is webcam quality. AMD is doing okay here, but they are probably a couple of generations away from Snapdragon's superior image signal processing, all of which is pretty minor though compared to our last big drawback, naming again, and I'm going somewhere with this right now. There are only two SKUs in the Ryzen 300 series, which get 12 and 10 cores respectively, but in the past, this would have been as many as six SKUs with a U suffix for low power, HS for middle of the road, and HX for all-out performance. This told to At a Glance roughly what class of laptop you were looking at. Well, not anymore. Now a single processor can be anywhere from 15 to 54 watts of power, so unless laptop makers

start publishing the power limits of the CPUs in their designs. Your friend's laptop could have access to literally 3.6 times the power of yours, despite both having the exact same name. I mean, we were very impressed by the capabilities of our power-limited chip, enough so that we were comfortable reviewing it against higher power chips, and it still did great. But we feel this practice is unnecessarily misleading and is an ugly stain on what should otherwise have been a total Victory lap of a launch for AMD. And there's one last catch: the price. We weren't able to find any perfect Apples-to-Apples comparisons on price, but it seems like laptops with AMD's latest and greatest are going to come with roughly a $100 premium over the last gen, and you can see that for yourself at the links down below. This certainly raises some questions about value for AMD. With that said, though, until Intel actually ships Lunar Lake, AMD is the only choice for laptops with a proper GPU, completely eliminating Qualcomm from the discussion if you need

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AMD Threw the Match but WON Anyway! - Strix Point Ryzen AI 300 Review

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