Arc B390 vs. Radeon 8060S: Two very different GPUs for the same 14-inch screen size

The Arc B390 may be the newest and fastest iGPU in town from Intel, but the competing Radeon 8060S is an even faster integrated solution from AMD running on an even higher power envelope. The benchmarks below compare the graphics performances of the 14-inch Asus ExpertBook Ultra to the 14-inch HP ZBook Ultra G1a equipped with the Core Ultra X7 358H and Ryzen AI Max 395+, respectively.

The AMD GPU handily outperforms the Arc B390 which is to be expected since the former operates under higher power limits than the latter. 3DMark benchmarks show a 55 to 65 percent improvement when it comes to older DX11 (Fire Strike) or DX12 (Time Spy) titles or an almost 90 percent improvement when enabling more advanced DX12 features like RT and mesh shaders (Speed Way). For raw performance, users will definitely want to consider the ZBook Ultra G1a over the Asus.

In terms of power consumption, however, running FurMark to stress the iGPU to 100 percent would consume around 56 W and 110 W on the Asus and HP, respectively. The HP system quite literally draws twice the power of the Asus in order to achieve the aforementioned 55 to 90 percent performance advantage. Performance-per-watt consequently favors the Panther Lake CPU in most cases.

The significant power envelope differences between the two CPUs naturally lead to significant differences between the ExpertBook Ultra and ZBook Ultra G1a even though both are 14-inch business-oriented laptops. The Asus is almost half a kilogram lighter with slightly smaller length, width, and height to be the much more portable solution. The older Radeon 890M matches the Arc B390 much more closely than the Radeon 8060S when it comes to power limits and cooling requirements, but it loses quite badly to the Intel GPU. It'll be interesting to see how AMD's eventual successor to the Radeon 890M can compare against the super-efficient Panther Lake iGPU series.