AMD Ryzen 9 H 270 vs Intel Xeon E-2186M

AMD Ryzen 9 H 270

The Ryzen 9 H 270 is a rebadged Ryzen 9 270 (or Ryzen 9 8945HS) for China, 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 H 270 is built with TSMC's 4 nm process for a reasonably good, as of early 2025, energy efficiency.

Intel Xeon E-2186M

The Intel Xeon E-2186M is a high-end processor for professional laptops with six cores based on the Coffee Lake architecture. The processor clocks at between 2.9 - 4.8 GHz (4.3 GHz with 6 cores) and can execute up to twelve threads simultaneously thanks to Hyper-Threading. The 4.8 GHz can only be reached using the "Thermal Velocity Boost" which allows one core to boost to 4.8 GHz (+200 MHz) as long as the CPU temperature is below 50°C. Multiple cores can be boosted +100 MHz below 50°C.

According to Intel, the CPU is manufactured in an improved 14nm (14nm++) process. Together with the Core i9-8950HK, the E-2186M is the fastest mobile processor in early 2018. Compared to the similar consumer Core i9, the mobile Xeon offers support for ECC main memory but has a locked multiplicator (no overclocking).

The Coffee Lake architecture is similar to Kaby Lake and differs only in the amount of cores (now six cores for the high end versions) and the improved 14nm process (14nm++ according to Intel).

Performance

Due to the two additional cores, performance has increased by almost 50% compared to a similar clocked Kaby Lake processor.

Graphics

The integrated Intel UHD Graphics 630 iGPU is supposed to offer a slightly higher performance as its clock rate has been increased by 50 MHz. The architecture is identical to that of the Intel HD Graphics 630. We do expect a performance improvement, but as a low-end solution it will probably only display current games smoothly at reduced details - if at all.

Power Consumption

Intel specifies the TDP with 45 watts and therefore the i9 is only suited for big laptops with good cooling solutions.