AMD Ryzen 5 7640HS vs Intel Core i9-12900HK

AMD Ryzen 5 7640HS

The Ryzen 5 7640HS is an upper mid-range processor (APU) of the Phoenix product family. It was brought to life in H1 2023 and it has 6 SMT-enabled Zen 4 cores (12 threads) running at 4.3 GHz to 5.0 GHz. The laptop chip is one of the first to feature Ryzen AI, AMD's answer to Intel's DL Boost and GNA technologies. The Radeon 760M iGPU is responsible for carrying out 3D calculations and similar duties.

Architecture & Features

Phoenix family chips are powered by the Zen 4 architecture, much like Dragon Range family chips are. The latter however lacks hardware AI workload acceleration capabilities that Phoenix has.

More importantly, Zen 4 introduces AVX512 support (Zen 3-powered chips did not have that) and, thanks to a plethora of other improvements including larger caches/registers/buffers across the board, is set to bring a double-digit IPC improvement.

Elsewhere, the 7640HS has 16 MB of L3 cache and a super-fast DDR5-5600 / LPDDR5x-7500 RAM controller. USB 4 (and thus Thunderbolt) is supported natively and so is PCIe 4. In fact, 20 PCIe 4 lanes are on offer; data transfer speeds of up to 7.8 GB/s will be possible provided a sufficiently fast NVMe SSD is used.

Systems powered by this Ryzen 5 series chip are expected to run 64-bit Windows 11, 64-bit Windows 10, or Linux. Please note that the APU is not overclockable and neither will you be able to replace it with a faster one as it gets soldered down permanently (FP7, FP7r2, FP8 socket interfaces).

Performance

The average 7640HS in our database is about as fast as the Ryzen 9 5900HX, Ryzen 7 6800H, Ryzen 7 7736U and also the Core i5-12500H, as far as multi-thread benchmark scores are concerned. This is a good if not record-breaking result as of mid 2023. Such a CPU will handle pretty much any task you can throw at it, gaming included.

Your mileage may vary depending on how high the CPU power limits are and how competent the cooling solution of your system is.

Graphics

The Radeon 760M has 8 CUs (512 shaders) running at up to 2,600 MHz. While this is not the best graphics adapter for gaming as it's only just fast enough for low quality settings and resolutions such as 1600 x 900, it will let you connect up to four SUHD 4320p monitors and it also HW-encodes and HW-decodes the most widely used video codecs such as AV1, HEVC and AVC.

Power consumption

The 7640HS has a long-term power limit (default TDP) of 35 W to 54 W, giving laptop makers a choice between improving battery life and giving the system they are working on more oomph. Either way, an active cooling solution is a must for any system powered by this chip.

The APU is built with TSMC's 4 nm process for high, as of late 2023, energy efficiency.

Intel Core i9-12900HK

The Intel Core i9-12900HK is a high-end mobile CPU for laptops based on the Alder Lake architecture. It was announced in early 2022 and offers 6 performance cores (P-cores, Golden Cove architecture) and 8 efficient cores (E-cores, Gracemont architecture). The P-cores support Hyper-Threading leading to 20 supported threads when combined with the E-cores. The clock rate ranges from 2.5 to 5 GHz on the performance cluster and 1.8 to 3.8 GHz on the efficiency cluster. The performance of the E-cores should be similar to old Skylake cores (compare with the Core i7-6920HQ). All cores can use up to 24 MB L3 cache. As a K-variant, the CPU offers an open multiplicator and therefore the possibility to overclock the CPU cores. Compared to the similar i9-12900H, the 12900HK only offers the "Essentials" features of vPro.

Performance

The average 12900HK in our database is in the same as the Core i9-13900H, as far as multi-thread benchmark scores are concerned. It's also almost as fast as the Ryzen 7 7745HX and the Core i5-13500HX. This is a super-fast processor, as of mid 2023; it will have no issues running any app or any game for at least two more years.

Thanks to its decent cooling solution and a long-term CPU power limit of 134 W, the Alienware x17 R2 P48E is among the fastest laptops built around the 12900HK that we know of. It can be more than 40% faster in CPU-bound workloads than the slowest system featuring the same chip in our database, as of August 2023.

Features

The integrated memory controller supports various memory types up to DDR5-4800, DDR4-3200, LPDDR5-5200, and LPDDR4x-4267. The Thread Director (in hardware) can support the operating system to decide which thread to use on the performance or efficient cores for the best performance. For AI tasks, the CPU also integrates GNA 3.0 and DL Boost (via AVX2). Quick Sync in version 8 is the same as in the Rocket Lake CPUs and supports MPEG-2, AVC, VC-1 decode, JPEG, VP8 decode, VP9, HEVC, and AV1 decode in hardware. The CPU only supports PCIe 4.0 (x8 for a GPU and two x4 for SSDs).

The integrated graphics card is based on the Xe-architecture and offers 96 EUs (Execution Units) operating at up to 1.45 GHz.

Power consumption

This Core i9 series chip has a "minimum assured" power consumption of 35 W, with 45 W being its Base power consumption. The maximum Intel-recommended Turbo power consumption sits at 115 W.

The i9-12900HK is manufactured on Intel's 4th generation 10 nm process marketed as Intel 7 for lower-than-average, as of mid-2023, energy efficiency.