Rembrandt and the Ryzen 9 6900HX
Ryzen 9 6900HX is one of two flagship mobile chips AMD is launching under Ryzen 6000 mobile (the other one being Ryzen 9 6980HX). Ryzen 6000, codenamed “Rembrandt” is based on the refreshed Zen3+ microarchitecture fabricated on TSMC‘s 6nm process node. It promised to bring notable performance and efficiency improvements as compared to Ryzen 5000 mobile and with the addition of its RDNA 2 iGPU, we shall also see several strides made towards better graphics performance. Speaking of the particular chip in question, the Ryzen 9 6900HX is a 8-core 16-thread offering from AMD with boost clocks up to 4.9 Ghz. Being an “HX” processor, it comes with an unlocked TDP of 45W+ giving manufacturers enough head room to push the 6900HX to its limits with state-of-the-art thermal solutions. Moreover, the chip also features 16 MB of L3 cache and 4 MB of L2 cache. Thanks to the RDNA 2 iGPUs inside each Ryzen 6000 mobile APU, AMD will finally produce a substantial uplift in graphical performance, especially compared to Vega. The 6900HX has the top-end Radeon 680M GPU inside with 12 Compute Units powering 768 cores. Lastly, we should also see some benefits due to the upgraded DDR5 and LPPDR4X memory options inside Ryzen 6000 “Rembrandt” laptops.
Benchmark scores
Coming to actual benchmark itself, the Ryzen 9 6900HX did remarkably well, though not quite as good as the very best. The APU was tested inside the Lenovo 82RG laptop with 32GB of memory, and it achieved 1,616 points in the single-threaded test and 10,151 points in the multi-threaded test. Both of these scores put it comfortably ahead of the its predecessor, the Ryzen 9 5900HX, but considerably behind the Core i9-12900H. On average, the 5900HX scores 1,417 points in the single-threaded benchmark and 7,658 in the multi-threaded benchmark. Compared to that, the 6900HX is about 14% faster in the single-thread department and a whooping 33% faster in the multi-thread department. The 6900HX even beats the Ryzen 9 5980HX easily, the highest-end Ryzen 5000 mobile chip. It achieves a 7.7% higher single-threaded score and a 24% higher multi-threaded score compared to the 5980HX.
The reason why this is so impressive is because AMD managed to achieve this uplift with a refreshed architecture that’s built on the foundation of the previous one. So, it’s technically not a “new” architecture per se, but it still provides a decent bump in performance. It’s likely that TSMC’s 6nm process alludes to the higher numbers rather than the higher clock speeds of the 6900HX. Now, compared to Intel’s Alder Lake flagship, the 6900HX gets beaten by a healthy margin. The Core i9-12900H netted a little over 4000 more points than the 6900HX in multi-threaded tests, and a little over 3000 points more in single-threaded tests. That constitutes a 44% and 21% lead over the Ryzen chip, respectively. And this doesn’t really come as a shock as the i9 has more cores, more threads, more cache, higher clock speeds and significantly higher power limit of 115W as compared to AMD’s 45W+. All of this works to give Intel’s chip the lead here.
Regardless of the loss to Intel, this benchmark shows us that Ryzen 6000 is still a solid upgrade over Ryzen 5000 as it offers improvements in all aspects, and the RDNA 2 iGPUs alone are enough to warrant the purchase of Rembrandt-H notebooks. Speaking of which, Ryzen 6000 notebooks should be available starting from February. But, when it comes to acquiring the very best of the best, Intel has AMD beat this time.
