AMD Ryzen 9 270 vs Intel Core i5-14450HX

AMD Ryzen 9 270

The Ryzen 9 270 is a rebadged Ryzen 9 8945HS, making it a fast mobile laptop processor. This is an APU of the Hawk Point family that has eight Zen 4 cores running at 4.0 GHz to 5.2 GHz. This APU was introduced at CES 2025 and all of its cores are SMT-enabled for a total of 16 processing threads.

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 9 270 to be Copilot+ certified.

Elsewhere, the chip has 16 MB of L3 cache and support for super-fast DDR5-5600 and LPDDR5x-7500 RAM while also being compatible with USB 4 and thus with Thunderbolt. It comes with 20 PCIe 4 lanes, giving fast NVMe SSD up to 7.8 GB/s of throughput.

Please note that this processor is not overclockable and neither is it user-replaceable. It gets soldered to the motherboard for good instead (FP8 socket interface).

Performance

Its CPU performance is slated to be identical to the old Ryzen 9 8945HS and R9 7940HS.

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 has 12 CUs (768 shaders) purring away at up to 2,800 MHz. The Radeon will let you use up to 4 monitors with resolutions as high as SUHD 4320p and it will also HW-decode and HW-encode the most widely used video codecs (such as AV1, HEVC and AVC) without breaking a sweat. As for gaming, most 2024 games run fine at 1080p with settings set to Low on this graphics adapter.

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

Power consumption

This Ryzen 9 series chip has a long-term power limit (default TDP) of 35 W to 54 W, giving laptop makers a choice between longer battery life and higher performance. Either way, an active cooling solution is a must for a system powered by this chip.

The R9 270 is built with TSMC's 4 nm process for a reasonably good, as of early 2025, energy efficiency.

Intel Core i5-14450HX

The Intel Core i5-14450HX is a mid-range CPU with 10 cores based on the Raptor Lake refresh series for large and heavy notebooks.

The total of 16 threads are divided into P-cores and E-cores, which we already know from Alder Lake. The 13450HX offers 6 performance cores (P-Cores, Raptor Cove or Golden Cove) with hyperthreading and 4 efficiency cores (E-Cores, Gracemont) without hyperthreading. The P-cores clock from 2.4 GHz (base clock) to 4.8 GHz (all cores) or 4.6 GHz (single core). The E-cores clock from 1.8 - 3.5 GHz. Compared to the older Core i5-13450HX the CPU cores are clocked slightly higher.

Compared to Alder Lake, the new Raptor Lake architecture offers improved P-cores (Raptor Cove architecture with more cache), more E-cores (same Gracemont architecture) and higher clock rates thanks to the improved Intel 7 process. In addition, Intel now supports faster DDR5 main memory in the top models (up to 5600 MHz, in the refresh now also in the i5).

The 14450HX is manufactured in the further improved 10nm FinFET process at Intel (Intel 7 process) and is specified with 55 watts base power and 157 watts turbo power.