AMD Ryzen 7 260 vs Intel Core Ultra 7 255HX

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.

Intel Core Ultra 7 255HX

The Intel Core Ultra 7 255HX is a mobile high-end CPU for gaming notebooks based on the Arrow Lake architecture. It offers 20 cores consisting of 8 fast performance cores with up to 5.2 GHz and 12 of the 16 smaller efficiency cores with up to 4.5 GHz clock speed. The CPU has access to 30 MB L2 cache and 36 MB L3 cache and is specified with a TDP of 55 watts.

The SoC integrates a small dedicated NPU called AI Boost with 13 TOPS (Int8) and optionally supports vPro Essentials. The integrated memory controller supports up to 192 GB DDR5-6400 (dual channel, ECC optional). The integrated GPU (iGPU) is a small Intel Graphics graphics card with four Xe cores running at 300 - 1850 MHz.

Performance - High End

Thanks to the improved IPC of the cores (especially the efficiency cores), the CPU should perform just behind or at the level of the Raptor Lake Core i9-14700HX (8 + 12 cores, max 5.5 / 3.9 GHz). This makes the CPU ideal for demanding tasks such as high-end gaming and content creation.

Production - TSMC and Foveros

The Arrow Lake-HX chips are based on the desktop Arrow Lake-S chips and are composed of several chiplets. The CPU part is manufactured at TSMC in the modern N3B (3nm) process, the GPU also comes from TSMC in the N5P process. The SoC and I/O tile are manufactured in the TSMC N6 process. The base tile is manufactured by Intel in the 22nm process and carries the individual chiplets thanks to Fovero's 3D packaging.