The AMD Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme SoC recently made its debut with the launch of the ASUS ROG Xbox Ally X. While AMD has already proven the mettle of its Ryzen Z Series APU, leaked benchmarks of Intel’s upcoming Panther Lake lineup suggest that the red chipmaker’s GPU could face some stiff competition.
According to a leaked 3DMark Time Spy graphics score, the iGPU of the Panther Lake scored 6300 points, versus the Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme’s 3,620 points. That’s approximately 72% ahead of the APU, and one that was built specifically for gaming handhelds.
The numbers, for what it’s worth, are clearly impressive, and do stand as a clear indicator that Intel is planning on taking the fight to AMD, but there are some discrepancies to take note of too. For starters, the testbench used to obtain the scores ran on LPDDR5X RAM running at 8,533MT/s, versus the 8,000MT/s of the memory used with the Xbox Ally X.
For another matter, there’s also the subject of driver optimisation and adoption by game developers, and this is an area where AMD has the upper hand. NVIDIA’s DLSS stack notwithstanding, many studios have had more time optimising their games to work with AMD’s Radeon GPUs and FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) upscaling technology.
It should also be noted that Panther Lake pulls more power, 45W to be exact, versus the 35W of the Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme.
That said, it’s still early days for Intel and Panther Lake. At this stage, we won’t be seeing a laptop fitted with the mobile chipset until next year, and its future as a chipset in a gaming handheld is still hazy. Whatever the case, we’ll be waiting Intel to provide us with a unit to perform our in-depth tests in the future.
(Source: Tom’s Guide, Notebookcheck)
