Zen5 mobile processors have been released.

I had ordered an ASUS Zenbook S16 laptop with Ryzen 9 AI 365 processor and it arrived today. Full tech specifications are at the link but include:

• Ryzen AI 365 processor with 10 cores: four Zen 5 and six Zen 5c, 20 threads, base clock=2.0 GHz, boost clock = 5 GHz, 10MB of L2 and 24 MB of L3.
• Navi 3.5 integrated graphics
• 24 GB of DDR5 memory
• 1 TB NVMe

So far I have only run Windows 11 Home and not tried to install Linux. Part of the reason why is I also want to try the “AI PC” features and hence am cautious since changing to Linux would be mostly a one-way proposition and the 1 TB disk is not particularly large for a dual boot.

I did try three “lighter” variations to run some Linux workloads:

• Oracle VirtualBox can install Ubuntu 24.04 but I seem to have strange hangs with what I tried.
• VMWare Player downloads seem to be down pointing to a Cloudflare page. I can try this later.
• WSL does install with Ubuntu 24.04. I was able to install phoronix test suite and got 413542 a score.

I haven’t yet done a lot of other testing. Some of this might involve running a more complete Linux install but I’ll wait a little to see my options (e.g. a mini-PC, this laptop, etc).

At the same time my laptop arrived they also appear to have arrived for Phoronix who did an article with Linux-based testing of an ASUS laptop. Their tests used the Ryzen AI 9 370 processor so 12 cores instead of 10 cores. The article is here.

A few interesting things I will note from the Phoronix tests and my own testing

• Coremark scores
  • Ryzen AI 365 (my laptop with WSL) – 413542
  • Ryzen 7840 HS (my mini-PC) – 464076
  • Ryzen AI 370 (Phoronix laptop) – 426538
  • Ryzen 7840 HS (Phoronix laptop) – 443276
• Overall, the Phoronix article picks a set of benchmarks where their Ryzen AI 370 is ~10% faster than their Ryzen 7840HS

By itself, my interest is more in exploring unique features of the Zen5 vs Zen5c cores and in seeing how the topdown core performance varies for different subsystems like branch prediction or execution units. In addition, understanding how the extra two (365) or four (370) cores contribute to workloads. So, I won’t necessarily run that many other workloads since they appear at least as dependent on other factors (e.g. power, memory speed) and are more a system-level than core-level comparison. Nevertheless still interesting to see this data start to come out.

Also note there is an AnandTech Review as well. Full review at the link, but some things that caught my attention

• The Zenbook S16 is configured to run the Ryzen 9 AI HX 370 at just 17W, so this explains in part differences with the mini-PC running at higher power. “ASUS has taken what’s nominally a 28W chip and dialed it down to 17W for it’s out-of-the-box experience”. There are other modes that consume more power with higher TDP. Testing was done at 28W.
• The mobile chips have a 256-bit SIMD so expect AVX-512 codes to run faster on desktop than equivalent mobile processors
• Core-to-Core latencies are printed, looks like a useful tool…also rather intriguing differences they show with Ryzen 9 7940HS.
• They run specrate with WSL but run with 1 core. This looks potentially interesting way to probe different core types.