AMD thoroughly decimated Intel with its Ryzen 5000 CPUs, and APUs across the previous few generations. The launch of the Ryzen 5000 mobile processors was an even bigger shocker as the chipmaker had a substantial lead in both single-threaded and multi-threaded workloads. (Viagra Connect) Things have shifted towards Intel with the launch of the 12th Gen Alder Lake-P lineup. Packing up to 14 cores, the Core i9-12900HK firmly holds onto the top spot in most workloads.
In Cinebench R23, the Core i9-12900HK is roughly 25% faster than the Ryzen 9 5900HX in both the single-threaded and multi-threaded benchmarks. Switching to battery power, the former not only loses its lead but also falls behind AMD’s Ryzen 9 5900X by 400 points. It’s important to note that the CPU clock governor and CPPC usually vary from OEM to OEM, and may be affected by firmware, in addition to the OS.
Therefore, unless we see a few more Alder Lake-P notebooks exhibiting the same behavior, the blame falls squarely on MSI. This is a bit surprising either way, as Intel has been using battery performance as a metric to make its Tiger Lake CPUs look better than their Ryzen counterparts.
Additionally, while the power profiles affect the CPU performance greatly when plugged-in, when running on battery, the impact of vendor-specific profiles is significantly diminished depending on how aggressively the device has been programmed to extend the battery life. We saw something similar with the Zephyrus G14 last year:
