AMD Ryzen 7 260 vs AMD Ryzen AI 7 350

AMD Ryzen 7 260

The Ryzen 7 260 is a fast Hawk Point family chip for laptops that was announced at CES 2025. It features 8 Zen 4 cores (16 threads thanks to SMT support) running at up to 5.1 GHz. The chip is identical to the old Ryzen 7 8845HS and therefore also the Ryzen 7 7840HS (which did have a lower clocked NPU).

Architecture and Features

Hawk Point family chips are powered by the Zen 4 architecture, much like Phoenix and Dragon Range family chips were. The 16 TOPS NPU present here isn't powerful enough for systems built around the 260 to be Copilot+ certified.

Elsewhere, the Ryzen 7 has 16 MB of L3 cache and a seriously fast RAM controller (up to LPDDR5x-7500 and up to DDR5-5600). PCI-Express speeds are capped at 1.97 GB/s per lane which corresponds to the 4.0 spec.

Please note that the APU isn't overclockable and neither is it user-replaceable. It gets soldered to the motherboard for good instead (FP8 socket interfaces).

Performance

Since the R7 260 is an 8845HS / 7840HS in disguise, it's safe to expect it to be just slightly faster than the Core i9-13900H and also the Ryzen 9 7940HS, as far as multi-thread performance is concerned.

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 780M (12 CUs / 768 shaders, up to 2,700 MHz) is capable of powering 4 monitors simultaneously with resolutions as high as SUHD 4320p. It will also have little issue hardware-encoding and hardware-decoding the most widely used video codecs (such as AV1, HEVC, AVC). As far as gaming is concerned, the thing will let you play most games at 1080p as long as you are fine with low of very low settings.

Your mileage may vary depending on how high the APU power limits are, how competent the cooling solution of your system is, how fast the RAM of your system is (there is no dedicated VRAM here).

Power consumption

This Ryzen 7 series chip has a long-term power limit (default TDP) of 35 W to 54 W, giving system makers a choice between improving battery life and making the system they're designing as powerful as possible. Either way, an active cooling solution is a must for a laptop or a mini-PC built around this Ryzen.

The R7 260 is built with a 4 nm TSMC process for high, as of late 2023, energy efficiency.

AMD Ryzen AI 7 350

The AMD Ryzen AI 7 350 is a powerful mobile processor from the Krackan Point family that was announced at CES in early 2025. The APU integrates 8 CPU cores (4x Zen 5 with up to 5 GHz and 4x Zen 5c with less cache and a maximum of 3.5 GHz) and a big 16 MB L3-Cache.

Architecture and features

The Krackan Point family APUs are powered by Zen 5 and Zen 5c microarchitecture cores located in separate clusters, the latter being a slightly slower, smaller and more energy efficient version of the former. One of the differences between Zen 5 and Zen 5c is the size of the cache; the Zen 5 cores have larger caches available.

However, the mobile Zen 5 implementation is reportedly (ChipsAndCheese) is closer to desktop Zen 4 than desktop Zen 5 due to the different cache sizes, large differences in AVX-512 throughput, and other factors.

Elsewhere, the Ryzen AI 7 chip supports DDR5-5600 and LPDDR5x-8000 RAM, giving system designers a choice between lower latency and higher throughput. The chip is natively compatible with USB 4 (and therefore Thunderbolt). It has PCIe 4.0 support for a throughput of 1.9 GB/s per lane, just like its 8000 series predecessors. The integrated XDNA 2 NPU, which is much more complex than the first generation XDNA, delivers up to 50 INT8 TOPS for accelerating various AI workloads.

As usual with laptop CPUs, the Ryzen 7 AI chip cannot be replaced by the user as it is soldered.

Performance

Thanks to the Zen 5 architecture and the high clock rates, the CPU performance should be very good.

Graphics

The Radeon 860M is the direct successor to the Radeon 760M and offers 8 cores (CUs = 512 shaders) and clocks at up to 3 GHz. It uses the new RDNA 3.5 architecture.

Power consumption

The AI 350 is said to have a base TDP of 28 W, although laptop manufacturers are free to set the TDP between 15 and 54 W.

The 4 nm TSMC process with which these CPUs are manufactured ensures above-average energy efficiency.