AMD Ryzen 9 H 270 vs Intel Core i5-12500H vs AMD Ryzen 5 240

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 Core i5-12500H

The Intel Core i5-12500H is a high-end mobile CPU for laptops based on the Alder Lake architecture. It was announced in early 2022 and offers 4 of the 6 performance cores (P-cores, Golden Cove architecture) and all 8 efficient cores (E-cores, Gracemont architecture). The P-cores support Hyper-Threading leading to 16 supported threads when combined with the E-cores. The clock rate ranges from 2.5 to 4.5 GHz on the performance cluster and 1.8 to 3.3 GHz on the efficient cluster. The performance of the E-cores should be similar to old Skylake cores (compared to the Core i7-6700HQ). All cores can use up to 18 MB L3 cache. Compared to the 12600H, the 12500H offers base clock for both clusters, a slower clocked iGPU and only "Essentials" vPro support.

Performance

The average 12500H in our database is in the same league as the Ryzen 9 6900HS, Ryzen 9 6900HX, Core i7-12650H and also the Core i9-11900H, as far as multi-thread benchmark scores are concerned. For something that's supposedly a mid-range chip, this kind of performance is just outrageously good, as of Q3 2023.

Thanks to its decent cooling solution and a long-term CPU power limit of 80 W, the Gigabyte G7 KE is among the fastest laptops built around the 12500H that we know of. It can be more than 40% faster in CPU-bound workloads than the slowest system featuring the same chip in our database, as of August 2023.

Architecture

The integrated memory controller supports various memory types up to DDR5-4800, DDR4-3200, LPDDR5-5200, and LPDDR4x-4267. The Thread Director (in hardware) can support the operating system to decide which thread to use on the performance or efficient cores for the best performance. For AI tasks, the CPU also integrates GNA 3.0 and DL Boost (via AVX2). Quick Sync in version 8 is the same as in the Rocket Lake CPUs and supports MPEG-2, AVC, VC-1 decode, JPEG, VP8 decode, VP9, HEVC, and AV1 decode in hardware. The CPU only supports PCIe 4.0 (x8 for a GPU and two x4 for SSDs).

The integrated graphics card is based on the Xe-architecture and offers 80 of the 96 EUs (Execution Units) operating at up to 1.3 GHz.

Power consumption

This Core i5 has a "minimum assured" power consumption of 35 W. Its Base power consumption sits at 45 W and its maximum Intel-recommended Turbo power consumption isn't supposed to exceed 95 W. A high-performance cooling solution is a must for a CPU like this one here.

Last but not he least, Intel Core i5-12500H is manufactured on Intel's fourth-generation 10 nm process marketed as Intel 7 for decent, as of late 2022, energy efficiency.

AMD Ryzen 5 240

The Ryzen 5 240 is an upper mid-range processor (APU) of the Hawk Point family. This isn't an entirely new chip, but a rebadged Ryzen 5 8645HS from 2024. The CPU features 6 SMT-enabled Zen 4 cores (12 threads) running at 4.3 GHz to 5.0 GHz. The Radeon 760M iGPU is responsible for carrying out 3D calculations and similar duties.

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 R5 240 has 16 MB of L3 cache and a super-fast DDR5-5600 / LPDDR5x-7500 RAM controller. USB 4 (and thus Thunderbolt) is supported natively and so is PCIe 4. In fact, 20 PCIe 4 lanes are on offer; data transfer speeds of up to 7.8 GB/s will be possible provided a sufficiently fast NVMe SSD is used.

Systems powered by this Ryzen 5 series chip are expected to run 64-bit Windows 11, 64-bit Windows 10, or Linux. Please note that the APU is not overclockable and neither will you be able to replace it with a faster one as it gets soldered to the motherboard permanently (FP7, FP7r2, FP8 socket interfaces).

Performance

Since the Ryzen 5 240 is an 8645HX / 7640HS in disguise, it is safe to expect the APU to be about as fast as the Ryzen 9 5900HX, Ryzen 7 6800H, Ryzen 7 7736U and also the Core i5-12500H, 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 760M has 8 CUs (512 shaders) running at up to 2,600 MHz. While this is not the best graphics adapter for gaming as it's only just fast enough for low quality settings and resolutions such as 1600 x 900, it will let you connect up to four SUHD 4320p monitors and it also HW-encodes and HW-decodes the most widely used video codecs such as AV1, HEVC and AVC without breaking a sweat.

Power consumption

The Ryzen 5 240 has a long-term power limit (default TDP) of 35 W to 54 W, giving laptop makers a choice between improving battery life and giving the system they are working on more oomph. Either way, an active cooling solution is a must for any system powered by the chip.

This Ryzen 5 series APU is built with TSMC's 4 nm process for high, as of late 2023, energy efficiency.