The AMD Ryzen 9 6900HX cannot keep up with a similarly-specced Alder Lake-P processor on Geekbench

Outside of AMD's official benchmarks, very little is known about the real-world performance of the Ryzen 6000 series. To make matters worse, AMD's CES 2022 presentation focused more on Rembrandt's RDNA2 GPU (rightfully so) and the AMD Advantage program. Now, we get our first glimpse at the top-of-the-line AMD Ryzen 9 6900HX in the wild. The eight-core, sixteen-thread processor is one rung below the Ryzen 9 6980HX, with the primary difference laying in their boost clocks.

Twitter leakers @TUM_APISAK and @Benchleaks stumbled upon the Ryzen 9 6900HX on Geekbench alongside a Lenovo-branded laptop. Its single-core scores were 1,593 and 1,616, and multi-core scores were 10,151 and 9,939 in two separate runs. Its arch-rival, the Core i9-12900HK, does significantly better with scores of 1,851 and 13,256. The multi-core test result isn't shocking, given that the Alder Lake part has fourteen cores in total due to its hybrid CPU architecture.

To make matters even worse, the AMD Ryzen 9 6900HX doesn't offer much of a performance uplift over its predecessor either. According to our benchmark database, the AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX scores an average of 1,536 and 8,355 in Geekbench's single and multi-core tests. Even if the Rembrandt processor tested was engineering samples not operating at peak capacity, it is unlikely for this model to do any better. Perhaps the Ryzen 9 6980HX could fare better, but it's hard to tell at this point.

Then again, we have to remember that Rembrandt is more about the iGPU than CPU performance gains. Its RDNA2 iGPU should demolish any Alder Lake iGPU and even some entry-level Arc dGPUs from Intel. Lastly, Geekbench is just one test and in no way indicative of a CPU's overall performance, so the Rembrandt SKUs still have the potential to catch up with Alder Lake-P.