AMD Ryzen 9 8940HX vs Intel Core i5-13600HX

AMD Ryzen 9 8940HX

The AMD Ryzen 9 8940HX is a flagship 16-core Dragon Range refresh lineup laptop processor that debuted in April 2025. The product offers 16 SMT-enabled Zen 4 cores (32 threads) running at 2.4 GHz to 5.3 GHz, along with a rather basic Radeon 610M RDNA 2 architecture iGPU. This Ryzen 9 8000 APU is essentially a Ryzen 9 7940HX with the Turbo clock speed increased by 100 MHz.

The 8940HX is composed of three dies made on two different nodes (5 nm for CPU cores; 6 nm for other componentry). It features a very healthy 28 PCIe 5 lanes for connecting graphics cards and SSDs as fast as 15.75 GB/s. The RAM controller is limited to DDR5-5200 or slower; there is no NPU and no Thunderbolt support, the product page on amd.com indicates, but the clock multiplier is unlocked for easy overclocking.

Performance

While we have not tested a single system featuring the 8940HX as of April 2025, we do have some Cinebench benchmark scores for the 7940HX. Based on those, the newer Ryzen 9 should have no trouble beating the Core i9-13950HX, Core i9-13980HX and Core i9-14900HX.

That being said, with this many cores the APU will probably do a much better job serving content creators rather than gamers.

Power consumption

Much like the 7940HX, the 8940HX has a base TDP (long-term power limit) of 55 watts that can officially be jacked up to as high as 75 watts. To dissipate 50+ watts, at least one high-RPM fan is needed.

Intel Core i5-13600HX

The Intel Core i5-13600HX is a fast mid-range mobile processor of the Raptor Lake series. Is was announced in early 2023 and integrates 6 fast Raptor Cove performance cores (P-cores) with HyperThreading and 8 Gracemont efficiency cores without HyperThreading. The P-Cores clock between 2.6 GHz (base) up to 4.8 GHz (single core boost, all-core 4.5 GHz). The smaller E-Cores clock between 1.9 and 3.6 GHz. All cores can access the combined 24 MB L3 cache. The CPU supports vPro (Enterprise) management features.

Compared to Alder Lake, Raptor Lake offers improved P-Cores (Raptor Cove micro-architecture) with bigger caches and more E-Cores (same Gracemont micro-architecture). Furthermore, the chip supports faster DDR5 memory (up to 5600 MHz for the 13980HX, but only 4800 MHz for the i5).

Performance

While we have not tested a single system built around the 13600HX as of August 2023, we have plenty of performance data for the i7-13650HX, a chip with almost the same specs (six P-cores mated to eight E-cores, with the latter running at the same clock speeds as what the 13600HX has and the former running at up to 100 MHz faster which is a very small difference). Based on that, we expect the 13600HX to be just a few percentage points behind the i7-13700HX and the i9-12950HX, meaning it's a very, very fast CPU, as of mid 2023.

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

Power consumption

The chip's "minimum assured" power consumption sits at 45 W. Its peak Turbo power consumption is not supposed to go over 157 W and its Intel-recommended Base power consumption is 55 W. Most laptop makers will probably go for a noticeably higher value to get better performance.

The i5-13600HX is built with Intel's 4th generation 10 nm process marketed as Intel 7 for average, as of early 2023, energy efficiency.