AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme Proves Very Versatile For Power/Performance - Benchmarks Against The Ryzen 7 7840U

With the ASUS ROG Ally being the first device powered by AMD's new Z1 Extreme SoC with Zen 4 CPU cores and RDNA3 graphics, it's been very interesting to see its performance advantages over the Steam Deck. But beyond its potential for use in gaming handhelds, it's quite fascinating to see how powerful the Z1 Extreme actually is when removing power restrictions on this SoC. In this article is a wide range of CPU benchmarks putting the Z1 Extreme up against the new Ryzen 7 7840U laptop SoC as well as prior generation Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U for reference. When adjusting the ACPI Platform Profile configuration, the Ryzen Z1 Extreme proves to be very robust from a low-power SoC delivering good battery performance up through pulling 50+ Watts while outperforming the 7840U.

Now having my hands on an AMD Ryzen 7 7840U laptop for this Phoenix SoC with its 8 cores / 16 threads and RDNA3 graphics, I was quite curious to see how the AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme in the ASUS ROG Ally compares with its also 8c/16t Zen 4 + RDNA3 design.

The AMD Ryzen 7 7840U as a reminder is 8 cores / 16 threads, 3.3GHz base clock, up to 5.1GHz boost clock, 8MB L2 cache, 16MB L3 cache, and a default TDP of 28 Watts but a cTDP of 15 to 30 Watts. The Ryzen 7 7840U's integrated RDNA3 graphics feature 12 CUs.

The AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme is spec'ed very similar to the Ryzen 7 7840U at 8 cores, 16 threads, 3.3GHz base clock, 8MB L2 cache, and 16MB L3 cache. The RDNA3 graphics are also similar at 12 cores. With the Z1 Extreme designed for a variety of custom purposes, it has a cTDP for 9 to 30 Watts with no standard default TDP rating.

The Z1 Extreme was benchmarked within the ASUS ROG Ally while running Ubuntu 23.04 with the Linux 6.4 kernel. With the ASUS ROG Ally supporting ACPI Platform Profiles, the Z1 Extreme was benchmarked in the default (balanced) mode as well as the power saver mode and then in the performance-optimized mode. As shown in the prior ROG Ally articles, adjusting the ACPI Platform Profile can make a huge difference on the overall performance of the SoC while also sharply driving up power use.

The Ryzen 7 7840U was tested within the Acer Swift Edge 16, a laptop also with 16GB of RAM similar to the ROG Ally. For prior generation reference was also the Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U running within the Lenovo ThinkPad X13 Gen 3. Again, all devices were tested atop clean installs of Ubuntu 23.04. With the Acer Swift Edge 16 there is no ACPI Platform Profile support at least not currently under Linux and thus just operating in its default mode.

Thus the configurations under test for today's article are:

- Lenovo ThinkPad - Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U
- Acer - Ryzen 7 7840U
- ROG Ally - Z1 Extreme, Saver [the energy efficient / power-optimized / quiet mode]
- ROG Ally - Z1 Extreme [the default balanced mode]
- ROG Ally - Z1 Extreme, Performance [the high performance mode of operation with the ACPI Platform Profile]

During the testing process the CPU SoC power consumption was monitored via the exposed RAPL/PowerCap sysfs interface.