AMD Ryzen 9 4900HS is faster than every mobile Intel Core i9 laptop in the market today according to our own benchmarks

Laptops sporting AMD Renoir CPUs are finally upon us meaning all those inevitable comparisons to Intel laptops will begin sprouting left and right. Naturally, we've decided to go straight for the jugular and compare the first octa-core Ryzen 9 4900HS laptop - the Asus Zephyrus G14 - to as many Coffee Lake-H Core i9 models we can find in our database.

The major benchmark we use for testing processor performance is CineBench R15 Multi-Thread running in a continuous loop. This method tests not only the initial burst of Turbo Boost performance of the processors, but also how they handle non-stop stress over long periods. Our graph below shows that some laptops will throttle much more than others over time. In this case, our Ryzen 9 4900HS laptop has the fastest initial Boost performance than the 17 other mobile Core i9 laptops in our database as exemplified by its highest initial CineBench score.

After accounting for throttling, however, the Ryzen 9 becomes "only" on par with the best Core i9 laptops available like the ginormous Asus ROG Mothership or the Alienware m17 R2 each equipped with the unlocked Core i9-9980HK. The Aorus 17 is a notable exception as it is able to maintain a minor but mostly consistent 5 percent lead over our Ryzen 9 system albeit at the cost of extreme fan noise.

There are a few other exceptions where Core i9 still outperforms our Ryzen 9. Laptops with desktop Core-i9 9900K or Core i9-9900KS CPUs like the MSI GT76 Titan or Eurocom Sky X4C are still faster than the new AMD chip by about 10 to 15 percent each in multi-threaded loads. Furthermore, single-threaded applications still favor Intel chips as exemplified by their faster Super Pi 32M completion times. Even so, the fact that a 7 nm 35 W AMD CPU can come so close to a 14 nm 95+ W Core i9 CPU shows how much catching up Intel will have to do when 10th gen Comet Lake-H becomes available later this year.