AMD Ryzen AI 7 350 vs Intel Core Ultra 7 255H

AMD Ryzen AI 7 350

The AMD Ryzen AI 7 350 is a powerful mobile processor from the Krackan Point family that was announced at CES in early 2025. The APU integrates 8 CPU cores (4x Zen 5 with up to 5 GHz and 4x Zen 5c with less cache and a maximum of 3.5 GHz) and a big 16 MB L3-Cache.

Architecture and features

The Krackan Point family APUs are powered by Zen 5 and Zen 5c microarchitecture cores located in separate clusters, the latter being a slightly slower, smaller and more energy efficient version of the former. One of the differences between Zen 5 and Zen 5c is the size of the cache; the Zen 5 cores have larger caches available.

However, the mobile Zen 5 implementation is reportedly (ChipsAndCheese) is closer to desktop Zen 4 than desktop Zen 5 due to the different cache sizes, large differences in AVX-512 throughput, and other factors.

Elsewhere, the Ryzen AI 7 chip supports DDR5-5600 and LPDDR5x-8000 RAM, giving system designers a choice between lower latency and higher throughput. The chip is natively compatible with USB 4 (and therefore Thunderbolt). It has PCIe 4.0 support for a throughput of 1.9 GB/s per lane, just like its 8000 series predecessors. The integrated XDNA 2 NPU, which is much more complex than the first generation XDNA, delivers up to 50 INT8 TOPS for accelerating various AI workloads.

As usual with laptop CPUs, the Ryzen 7 AI chip cannot be replaced by the user as it is soldered.

Performance

Thanks to the Zen 5 architecture and the high clock rates, the CPU performance should be very good.

Graphics

The Radeon 860M is the direct successor to the Radeon 760M and offers 8 cores (CUs = 512 shaders) and clocks at up to 3 GHz. It uses the new RDNA 3.5 architecture.

Power consumption

The AI 350 is said to have a base TDP of 28 W, although laptop manufacturers are free to set the TDP between 15 and 54 W.

The 4 nm TSMC process with which these CPUs are manufactured ensures above-average energy efficiency.

Intel Core Ultra 7 255H

The Intel Core Ultra 7 255H is a mobile high-end CPU for larger notebooks based on the Arrow Lake architecture. It offers 16 cores consisting of 6 fast performance cores (Lion Cove) with up to 5.1 GHz and 8 smaller efficiency cores (Skymont) with up to 4.4 GHz clock speed and two additional "low power" efficiency cores with up to 2.5 GHz (Skymont). The CPU has access to 24 MB of cache and is specified with a TDP of 28 watt (PL1, 115W PL2).

The SoC integrates a small dedicated NPU called AI Boost with 13 TOPS (Int8) and optionally supports vPro Essentials. The integrated memory controller supports up to 192 GB LPDDR5/x-8400 or DDR5-6400 (dual channel). The integrated GPU (iGPU) is an Intel Arc 140T graphics card which offers eight Xe cores with up to 2.25 GHz.

Performance - High End

The Core Ultra 7 is superior to the top model Core Ultra 9 285H as only the maximum Turbo frequency is 200 MHz lower. Due to the improved IPC of the cores (especially the efficiency cores), the CPU should perform slightly below the level of the old Raptor Lake Core Core 9 270H (6 + 8 cores, max 5.8 / 4.1 GHz). This makes the CPU very suitable for demanding tasks such as high-end gaming and content creation.

Chiplet design

Like the desktop and HX chips, the Arrow Lake-H chips are based on individual chiplets that are placed on a 22nm base tile from Intel using Foveros 3D packaging. The CPU part comes from TSMC using the modern N3B (3nm) process. As with HX, the GPU also is produced at TSMC and is manufactured using the N5P process. SoC and I/O Tile are also from TSMC but in the older N6 process.