Intel Core Ultra 5 225U vs AMD Ryzen AI 5 340

Intel Core Ultra 5 225U

The Intel Core Ultra 5 225U is an upper mid-range CPU with 12 cores from the Meteor Lake U series, which was introduced at the beginning of 2025. The chip is similar to the Meteor Lake U series, but the compute part is manufactured in the modern Intel 3 process and therefore offers higher clock rates.

The SoC continues to rely on a tile/chiplet design. The smaller compute tile (compared to the H processors) offers 2 performance cores (P cores, Redwood Cove architecture, SMT) and 8 efficiency cores (E cores, Crestmont architecture). The P-cores support hyperthreading (therefore 14 threads together) and clock up to 4.8 GHz. The E-cores clock at a maximum of 3.8 GHz. In addition, there are now two more low-power efficiency cores with up to 2.4 GHz on the low-power island; the compute tile can therefore be completely deactivated when idle and during simple tasks in order to save power.

Performance

Due to the higher clock rates and the support of faster memory, the performance is slightly below the old top model Core Ultra 7 165U (12 cores, max 4.9 / 3.8 GHz) and well ahead of the old Core Ultra 5 135U (12 cores, max 4.4 / 3.6 GHz).

Graphics unit

The Core Ultra 5 225U offers a new Arc-based iGPU called Intel Graphics with 4 Xe cores and 64 EUs that reach a maximum of 2 GHz. However, the performance is far below the new Arc iGPU in the H series.

Features

Arrow Lake-U has integrated WiFi 6E (WiFi 7 optional). The integrated memory controller now supports LPDDR5/x-8400 or DDR5-6400 (max. 128 GB). A dedicated NPU (2x Gen3 Neural Compute Engines) is now used. The Xe Media Engine supports MPEG-2, AVC, VC-1 Decode, JPEG, VP8 Decode, VP9, HEVC and AV1 Decode up to 8K 10-bit HDR. The chip now supports PCIe-5.0 (x8 for GPU) and PCIe-4.0 (three x12 for SSDs).

Power consumption

The Intel Core Ultra 5 225U is specified with 15 watts TDP (base) and 57 watts (PL2) max. turbo power. Meteor Lake consists of five individual chips, whereby the processor part is manufactured using the new Intel 3 process (5 nm). The graphics unit is produced at TSMC in N5 and the SoC and I/O tile in the older N6 process. These 4 chips are then applied to the 22 nm base tile using the Foveros process.

AMD Ryzen AI 5 340

The AMD Ryzen AI 5 340 is a powerful mobile processor from the Krakan Point family that was announced at CES in early 2025. The APU integrates 6 CPU cores (3x Zen 5 with up to 4.8 GHz and 3x Zen 5c with less cache and a maximum of 3.4 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 5 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 5 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 840M is a downscaled Radeon 890M that offers only 4 cores (CUs = 256 shaders) and clocks at up to 2.9 GHz. It uses the new RDNA 3.5 architecture.

Power consumption

The AI 340 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.