AMD announced its Ryzen 6000 mobile processors at CES 2022, marking the launch of the fifth Zen-based APU family for notebooks and high-performance laptops. Although based on the same Zen 3 core architecture as the preceding Ryzen 5000 “Cezanne” lineup, Rembrandt takes advantage of TSMC’s 6nm (N6) node which brings about a 15% reduction in die area compared to N7. This has been achieved by switching from double diffusion breaks to a single isolation line. The use of the same design rules as N7 also makes it a convenient upgrade path for existing customers.
The key highlight of Rembrant is the upgraded RDNA 2 graphics processor (and the accompanying DDR5/LPDDR5 memory). However, that’s not the focus of this report. We’ll be looking at the CPU performance of Rembrandt and compare it against Intel’s 12th Gen Alder Lake processors, while also analyzing the gains with respect to the existing Ryzen 5000 SKUs. In terms of single-threaded performance, Geekbench shows an advantage of roughly 15-20% for the Core i9-12900HK (over the Ryzen 9 6900HX) with a score of approximately 1,895 points (vs 1,593 for the 6900HX).
The multi-threaded section is where the Alder Lake-H flagship truly shines. Courtesy of the efficiency (Gracemont) cores that push its overall core count to 14 (a first for Intel), the Core i9-12900HK is a considerable 42% faster than the Ryzen 9 6900HX in the multi-threaded performance segment.
Finally, looking at the Ryzen 9 5900HX, we can see that the 6900HX’s lead in single-threaded workloads is just over 5%, with the multi-threaded performance growing by roughly 25%. This can be primarily attributed to power optimizations, and the use of an upgraded DDR5/LPDDR5 memory subsystem.
