AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX leak suggests laptop CPU could be serious trouble for Intel

AMD’s Ryzen 9 5900HX has been spotted again – the supposed next-gen ‘Cezanne’ chip for laptops which may just allow for overclocking – and this time it’s in a benchmark showing a clean pair of heels to Intel’s Core i7-10700K desktop product, and the Core i9-10980HK mobile CPU for that matter.

Tum_Apisak brought attention to this leak on Twitter, with the Ryzen 9 5900HX being spotted in an Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 SE (GX551QS) laptop in the Geekbench 5 database.

ASUSTeK ROG Zephyrus Duo 15 SE GX551QSAMD Ryzen 9 5900HXBase Frequency 3.30 GHzMaximum Frequency 4.71 GHzGeekbench 5 Score1534 - 9015https://t.co/uM2GZaDnKk pic.twitter.com/bb70KNJdNPDecember 19, 2020

The CPU hit a single-core score of 1,534 and multi-core tally of 9,015, which is seriously impressive for a piece of silicon aimed at a notebook. In the result, the 5900HX is recorded as an 8-core chip capable of boosting to 4.7GHz.

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Moving on to look at some comparative results, we have to bear in mind that this is just a single benchmark for the purported 5900HX – so far from an overall picture – and we must take a healthy pinch of salt as regards to whether it’s even genuine.

However, it’s obviously an interesting process to get some perspective on where this Geekbench result stands compared to Intel’s rival chips and AMD’s Ryzen predecessors alike. Comparing it to Intel’s Core i9-10980HK, as Tom’s Hardware – which spotted all this – points out, that flagship Comet Lake-H mobile chip achieved 1,374 for single-core and 8,444 for multi-core in one run.

That means the 5900HX is just over 10% and 6% faster respectively, although as mentioned, going by a single score in just one benchmark is a very limited field of view, so let’s not get carried away.

Desktop comparisons

Perhaps even more interestingly, we can see that the 5900HX is capable of outpowering Intel’s desktop processors. The Core i7-10700K has a Geekbench 5 average of 1,350 and 8,982 respectively, so the 5900HX would seem to be 12% faster for single-core and basically equal in multi-core.

If this turns out to be reflective of real performance levels, or at least in the right ballpark, it’s a seriously impressive result for AMD given that we are talking about a laptop chip here, compared to a desktop CPU which is pulling way more power to achieve its performance levels (125W in fact).

Indeed, even if we take Intel’s flagship 10900K, that only manages an average 1,405 at single-core, so the 5900HX is actually around 8% faster – although the 10-core Intel CPU obviously wins the multi-core battle by some margin (at almost 11,000).

Of course, we should also look at existing Ryzen mobile chips, with the Ryzen 9 4900H hitting a result of 1,232 and 8,820 for single-core and multi-core in one sample benchmark run Tom’s spotted, making the 5900HX around 20% faster in the former department, although only a couple of percent better when it comes to multi-core.

Should Intel be worried? Yes, is the short answer to that, particularly as the theory is that the ‘HX’ suffix could mean that this Ryzen CPU may facilitate overclocking, potentially giving rise to even better performance (depending on the exact laptop and cooling solution used, naturally).

The Ryzen 5000 mobile range is very much looking like a strong contender in the laptop world, then, and we should hopefully see these chips unveiled by AMD at the start of 2020 during CES.