AMD Ryzen 9 8945HS vs AMD Ryzen 7 6800H

AMD Ryzen 9 8945HS

The Ryzen 9 8945HS is a rebadged Ryzen 9 7940HS with higher clock speeds on the Ryzen AI NPU. To be more specific, this is a powerful Hawk Point family laptop chip that has eight Zen 4 cores running at 4.0 GHz to 5.2 GHz. This APU was brought to life in H2 2023 and all of its cores are SMT-enabled for a total of 16 processing threads.

The Radeon 780M serves as the integrated graphics adapter.

Architecture & Features

Hawk Point family chips are powered by the Zen 4 architecture, much like Phoenix and Dragon Range family chips are. That's not to say there is no difference between the three. With Hawk Point, AMD is betting big on generative AI; these chips are promised to deliver an up to 40% increase in generative AI performance over 7040 series APUs making apps like DaVinci Resolve and Adobe Photoshop even more powerful.

Unlike Zen 3, Zen 4 features AVX512 support and, thanks to a plethora of other improvements including larger caches/registers/buffers across the board, is slated to bring a double-digit IPC improvement over the former.

Elsewhere, the 8945HS has 16 MB of L3 cache and support for super-fast RAM (up to LPDDR5x-7500 or DDR5-5600; no ECC support). The processor is compatible with USB 4 and thus with Thunderbolt; PCIe support is limited to the 4.0 spec for a throughput of 1.97 GB/s per lane. 20 lanes are available.

OS support is limited to 64-bit editions of Windows 11 and Windows 10 and of course to Linux. Note that the chip isn't overclockable and neither is it user-replaceable as it gets soldered down for good (FP7, FP7r2, FP8 socket interfaces).

Performance

The 8945HS is an R9 7940HS in disguise, so it's realistic to expect the chip to be just slightly faster than the Core i9-12900HK and also the Ryzen 7 7840HS, 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 has 12 CUs (768 shaders) running at up to 2,800 MHz. This is a very fast iGPU, as of late 2023. It will let you use up to 4 monitors with resolutions as high as SUHD 4320p, and it is also capable of HW-encoding and HW-decoding the most widely used video codecs including AVC, HEVC and AV1. More importantly, it is fast enough for proper 1080p gaming as long as one is fine with low to medium detail settings.

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 8945HS is built with TSMC's 4 nm process for high, as of late 2023, energy efficiency.

AMD Ryzen 7 6800H

The AMD Ryzen 7 6800H is a processor for big (gaming) laptops based on the Rembrandt generation. The R7 6800H integrates all eight cores based on the Zen 3+ microarchitecture. They are clocked at 3.2 (guaranteed base clock) to 4.7 GHz (Turbo) and support SMT / Hyperthreading (16 threads). The chip is manufactured on the modern 6 nm TSMC process.

The new Zen 3+ is a refresh of the Zen 3 architecture and should not offer a lot of changes. The chip itself however, offers a lot of new features, like support for USB 4 (40 Gbps), PCI-E Gen 4, DDR5-4800MT/s or LPDDR5-6400MT/s, WiFi 6E, Bluetooth LE 5.2, DisplayPort 2, and AV1 decode.

A big novelty is the integrated GPU Radeon 680M that is now based on the RDNA2 architecture and offers 12 CUs at up to 2.2 GHz. It should be the fastest iGPU of all at the time of announcement.

Performance

The average 6800H in our database is in the same league as the Core i5-12500H and the Core i7-12650H, as far as multi-thread benchmark scores are concerned. The Ryzen 9 5900HX is found close nearby as well.

Thanks to its decent cooling solution and a long-term CPU power limit of 90 W, the Legion 5 Pro 16ARH7H is among the fastest systems built around the 6800H that we know of. It can be about 60% faster in CPU-bound workloads than the slowest system featuring the same chip in our database, as of August 2023.

Power consumption

This Ryzen 7 series chip has a default TDP, also known as the long-term power limit, of 45 W. An active cooling solution is a must for a CPU like this.

The R7 6800H is built with TSMC's 6 nm manufacturing process for above average, as of mid 2023, energy efficiency.