AMD Ryzen AI 7 350 Benchmark Tips Cut-Back Radeon 860M GPU
AMD's upcoming Ryzen AI Kraken Point APUs appear to be affordable APUs for next-generation thin-and-light laptops and potentially even some gaming handhelds. Murmurings of these new APUs have been going around for quite some time, but a PassMark benchmark was just posted, giving us a pretty comprehensive look at the hardware configuration for the upcoming Ryzen AI 7 350. While the CPU configuration in the PassMark result confirms the 4+4 configuration we reported on previously, it seems as though the iGPU portion of the new Ryzen AI 7 is getting something of a downgrade compared to previous generations.
While all previous mobile Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 9 APUs have featured the Radeon -80M or -90M series iGPUs, the Ryzen AI 7 350 steps down to the AMD Radeon 860M. Although not much is known about the new iGPU, it uses the same nomenclature as the Radeon iGPUs found in previous Ryzen 5 APUs, suggesting it is the less performant of the new 800 series iGPUs. This would be the first time, at least since the introduction of the Ryzen branding, that a Ryzen 7 CPU will use a cut-down iGPU. This, along with the 4+4 (Zen 5 and Zen 5c) heterogenous architecture, suggests that this Ryzen 7 APU will prioritize battery life and thermal performance, likely in response to Qualcomm's recent offerings. Comparing the 760M to the single 860M benchmark on PassMark reveals similar performance, with the 860M actually falling behind the average 760M by an average of 9.1%. Take this with a grain of salt, though, since there is only one benchmark result on PassMark for the 860M.
While all previous mobile Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 9 APUs have featured the Radeon -80M or -90M series iGPUs, the Ryzen AI 7 350 steps down to the AMD Radeon 860M. Although not much is known about the new iGPU, it uses the same nomenclature as the Radeon iGPUs found in previous Ryzen 5 APUs, suggesting it is the less performant of the new 800 series iGPUs. This would be the first time, at least since the introduction of the Ryzen branding, that a Ryzen 7 CPU will use a cut-down iGPU. This, along with the 4+4 (Zen 5 and Zen 5c) heterogenous architecture, suggests that this Ryzen 7 APU will prioritize battery life and thermal performance, likely in response to Qualcomm's recent offerings. Comparing the 760M to the single 860M benchmark on PassMark reveals similar performance, with the 860M actually falling behind the average 760M by an average of 9.1%. Take this with a grain of salt, though, since there is only one benchmark result on PassMark for the 860M.
