The AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 Review: Unleashing Zen 5 and RDNA 3.5 Into Notebooks
by Gavin Bonshor on July 28, 2024 9:00 AM ESTASUS Zenbook S 16: Power Consumption & Performance Modes
A big part of any laptop's performance is its TDP – how much energy the chassis can consistently dissipate – meaning that two laptops can have wildly different performance, despite using the same chip, just by virtue of their cooling capabilities. So measuring the peak and sustained power consumed by a laptop is particularly important, both to get an idea of where it falls on the ultrabook-to-DTR spectrum, but also how a design compares to other laptops. Especially with an architecture launch like this one, we need to know if a performance lead comes from architecture and efficiency, or just running a lot of power through a chip.
The AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 has a rather large configurable TDP range overall, with the chip capable of being set to anything between 15 and 54 W. This gives Strix Point a wide berth to fit in everything from ultrabooks to larger gaming notebooks, but it also means that the chip's performance, particularly in heavily multi-threaded and mixed CPU/GPU workloads is going to be defined by its TDP.
Despite its 16-inch frame, In the ASUS Zenbook S 16 is configured rather conservatively. ASUS has taken what's nominally a 28W chip and dialed it down to 17W for it's out-of-the-box experience. Dubbed "Standard Mode" the out-of-the-box experience is a laptop that's highly efficient and highly quiet, but does leave some performance on the table for the sake of acoustics.
ASUS also gives the user quite a bit of latitude to pick performance modes here, with the Zenbook offering 4 different modes altogether. Besides the standard mode, there's the ultra quiet "Whisper mode", the performant "Performance Mode" with a 28W TDP, and the no-holds-barred "Full-speed Mode".
For most of the Zenbook S 16 you'll see today – ours included – you'll find these laptops are running in the 28 Watt Performance Mode. This comes by request of AMD, who is looking to show off what the chip can do at its standard TDP, rather than ASUS's dialed-down TDP. And while we're not beholden to this (or any other) request from AMD, from a pragmatic standpoint it's a lot easier to find 28W laptops than it is 17W laptops. So for our first round of testing, we have dialed up our laptop to its 28W mode.
In our peak power test, the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 ramped up and peaked at 33 W. We typically see a higher peak power value than the TDP before things settle down during an intensive workload, although the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H within the ASUS Zenbook 14 OLED did manage to peak at 64 W for a very brief moment, which is way out of spec.
Looking at the power of the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 when using Maxon's latest Cinebench 2024 (multi-threaded test) benchmark, which is quite an intensive rendering workload, we can see how it compares to the Ryzen 9 7940HS when dialed down to 35W, as well as the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H which is running at 28W within the ASUS Zenbook 14 OLED. Aside from the very large spike up to 45W on the Core Ultra 7 155H, we see a pretty consistent level of power usage from the CPU package (the cores).
Focusing on the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370, we can see it quickly ramped up and achieved a very consistent load level, bouncing between 32 and 33 W throughout the Cinebench 2024 MT benchmark loop. As the benchmarking loop carried on, power consumption slowly dropped to a steady-state TDP of 28W, matching the configured TDP of the laptop. The slow and gradual drop in power towards the end was very smooth. The same can be said about the Ryzen 9 7940HS. In contrast, the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H produces some slightly noisier data, bouncing around between 26.5 W and 29 W throughout the test.
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kkilobyte - Sunday, July 28, 2024 - link
I don't find it disappointing at all. It manages to perform as well or better (sometimes by a significant amount), while running on a 28W instead of 35W budget. I think it is a very important point when it comes to laptop CPUs.It's pretty unfortunate that AT didn't also test the laptop with the 17W TDP. It would have been very interesting to see how big (or not) the impact on performances was. If the loss is limited, it may be an nice tradeoff for that kind of machine.
brucethemoose - Sunday, July 28, 2024 - link
> There isn't a defined benchmark that tests AI performance from a level playing fieldllama.cpp has a vulkan backend, and a couple of built in benchmarks. Its not the *fastest* backend (people on AMD/Intel just use rocm or sycl), but it's at least fair.
There are also vulkan ports of other models like esrgan.
Gavin Bonshor - Sunday, July 28, 2024 - link
Hey Bruce, thanks for the heads up on that. I'll check it outMakaanPL - Sunday, July 28, 2024 - link
Thank you for the review, nice work as always. Strix Point beating last-gen HS chip despite low cooling performance chassis is quite promising. It doesn't address the idle power, though, and in the mobile space it's very important as well.By the way, do you plan to cover production laptops with Qualcomm X Elite/Plus? Yoga seems to be really interesting and only one with reasonable pricing of 32GB RAM option, but very few reviews were published so far.
Ryan Smith - Sunday, July 28, 2024 - link
"By the way, do you plan to cover production laptops with Qualcomm X Elite/Plus?"Yes. It's taken entirely too long to get a sample in, but we should finally have one at the start of August.
eastcoast_pete - Monday, July 29, 2024 - link
I fully place the blame for that delay on Qualcomm and their launch partners. They have been quite "picky" about who gets what subnotebook or 2-in-1 and when. Which I believe was a mistake; they now face competition from AMD (like this one here) and soon also from Lunar Lake. At least AMD has apparently learned from their bad example, and sent out review units to many sites quickly.Khanan - Sunday, July 28, 2024 - link
Good article.Terry_Craig - Sunday, July 28, 2024 - link
What is most impressive is that even in this ultra-thin model the framerate is super stable.abufrejoval - Sunday, July 28, 2024 - link
A great piece of engineering on both sides for sure, very much where I was hoping AMD would land in terms of performance.And I was very tempted until I saw the price: ASUS asks for more than €2000 on their direct sales shop and that is just way too much no matter what. Doing as good as the fruity cult doesn't mean you should charge their prices, especially the €400 markup for 8GB of RAM and 1TB of SSD.
I guess the ASUS exclusivity wasn't cheap, but I'll wait until prices have gone to saner levels, which I'm very sure they will.
And then I really wanted 64GB of RAM, which I believe is actually impossible with LPDDR5?
eastcoast_pete - Monday, July 29, 2024 - link
You might have to wait for the first LPCAMM2 notebooks for that. Micron and I believe Samsung are shipping memory modules that allow for 64 GB fast LP RAM.And yes, I agree on the pricing; it's, let's say, ambitious. And not helping with fast uptake. While Meteor Lake laptops are not as fast (but not that much slower either), they can be had, nicely equipped, for a lot less.
It'll be interesting to see how Intel and launch partners will price Lunar Lake, and of course how Lunar Lake will perform.