Three-year old Ryzen 7 7735HS still holds up well against the new Ryzen AI 7 445

AMD has refreshed its Ryzen AI family this year with the new Ryzen AI 400 series to replace last year's Ryzen AI 300 series. Fans looking for substantial upgrades, however, may be disappointed as the Ryzen AI 400 series offers only mild improvements over the Ryzen AI 300 series. Certain Ryzen 7 CPUs from older generations may even perform better than the latest Ryzen AI 7 CPUs when it comes to specific tasks.

The charts below compare the recently released Ryzen AI 7 445 to the three-year old Ryzen 7 7735HS as found on the Lenovo Yoga 7 2-in-1 16 and GMK NucBox K16 mini PC, respectively. The older Zen 3 CPU would outperform the newer Zen 5 CPU in most multi-core benchmarks including CineBench and 7-Zip by 10 to 15 percent. On the other hand, the newer Zen 5 CPU would consistently outperform the Zen 3 CPU on GeekBench, single-core benchmarks, and HWBOT x265 decoding/encoding.

The performance discrepancy between the two CPUs can be partly attributed to the larger number of cores on the Ryzen 7 7735HS than on the Ryzen AI 7 445 (8 vs. 6). Raw multi-threaded workloads would therefore run slightly faster on the older CPU but, alternatively, more efficiently on the newer CPU.

Despite the performance differences above, the newer Zen 5 CPU is arguably still the better option for most users due to its integrated NPU and superior power efficiency. When running Cyberpunk 2077, for example, our Ryzen AI 7 445 Radeon 840M system would consume roughly 35 percent less power while offering similar frame rates than our Ryzen 7 7735HS Radeon 680M system. For an all-rounder or multimedia-focus PC, the Zen 5 CPU is objectively the more balanced processor even if it sacrifices a bit of multi-thread performance along the way.