I tested Intel's Core Ultra 9 against AMD's Ryzen AI 9 in a power laptop face-off

The Intel versus AMD battle had raged on for years. It's like iPhone versus Android, but even nerdier in the battle for best laptop.

Tiresome? Sure, but it's a good time to return to this old feud just for a quick update. Because interesting things are afoot...

I've just had a chance to properly take a look at Intel's latest second-generation Ultra series processors for laptops, and they see Intel do its best to upset the status quo.

For years, AMD has generally been ahead for graphics performance thanks to oodles of experience with the AMD Radeon line – and with real-world battery life. And Intel would generally do better on the CPU side.

I've had a couple of MSI laptops in from the company's Prestige line to see what's what, pitching the Intel Core Ultra 9 285H against the AMD Ryzen AI 9 365. Here's which wins – and why.

Intel vs AMD: Laptop Design

The AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 and Intel Ultra 9 285H on test are performance chipsets, not ones made for the best lightweight laptops. However, that no longer means you’ll only find them in chunky and heavy PCs either.

Take the MSI ones I'm using for this comparison as an example. The MSI Prestige 16 AI with Intel CPU only weighs 1.55kg. I’ve used it as an everyday portable for the last few weeks, and it disappears into a normal rucksack just as handily as my MacBook Air would. It just takes up a wee bit more space as this is a desktop-replacer size beast.

The AMD-powered MSI Prestige PC is quite a bit heavier and thicker, but that’s largely because it has a different shell design. And it’s made of aluminium rather than a mix of magnesium alloy and plastic.

In theory, the AMD might even be able to fit into a slimmer, less well-cooled case. It has a thermal design power (TDP) of 28W to Intel’s 45W, which tells you the amount of heat a processor is designed to generate when running under strain. However, these aren’t exact, standardised numbers. So let’s not dwell on them too much.

The real takeaway is you won’t ever see these processors in fan-free laptop. And probably not in a ridiculously tiny one, because their peak sustained performance would likely need to be throttled a little too much to make it worthwhile. But if you only thought these kind of performance chipsets were for chunky things, think again.

Intel vs AMD: Performance

Intel caught a lot of stick for its first-generation Intel Ultra chipsets. While they were great all-rounders, their raw processor performance really wasn’t all that impressive, with benchmark results beaten by the Qualcomm-powered rivals, and even some last-generation Intel chips.

It’s because, while the AMD Ryzen 365 AI is part of a pretty steady lineage, Intel's Core Ultra represented more of a shake-up that required some more dramatic work in areas other than the usual performance gains. And it kinda needed that shake-up because Intel had spent a little too long considering itself the best. The company’s share price suggests that sort of thing isn’t healthy.

The good news: the Intel Ultra 9 265H is a lot more powerful than the original Ultra laptops we reviewed. Its single-core performance is great, and so is its multi-core prowess this time. It helps this is a top tier chipset, of course.

Next to it, the AMD holds up just fine on single-core speeds. But when you put the 10 cores of the Ryzen up against the might of the 6 performance cores plus 10 efficiency core of the Intel, AMD can’t quite keep up. We saw roughly 22% better performance from the Ultra 9 285H.

If you’re keen on AMD, though, you can bridge some of the gap by upgrading to the 12-core AMD Ryzen AI 9 375 instead. But according to benchmarking tool Geekbench, the Intel still maintains a lead even then...

Intel vs AMD: Gaming

For ages AMD-powered laptops have been the go-to if you want to play the odd game and can only stretch to a laptop with integrated graphics. Its Radeon chips are pretty tidy.

Intel started catching up with the release of its Intel Xe line, and came close with the Intel Arc series of integrated chips. With the Core i9 285H, however, Intel appears to have jumped ahead. And not by a small margin according to my tests...

In a Cyberpunk 2077 1080p benchmark, with Medium visuals, the Intel laptop scores 32fps, compared to 20fps in the AMD one. It achieves just 62% the speed of the Intel.

If this sounds pretty bad for both, it’s because I had to disable all upscaling techniques with XeSS and FRS to make the results more directly comparable.

The same was true in the 3D Mark Time Spy test, where the Intel scored 4462 points, to the AMD’s 3847. Doing the maths again, the AMD reaches 86% of the power of the Intel.

It’s likely closer to the truth than the Cyberpunk 62% score, because benchmarks are made to be fair. Actual game optimisation is generally less even.

There’s an elephant in the room here, though. AMD has a step-up model with an even better graphics chipset, the AMD 9 AI 370 with Radeon 890M. Still, if you see a laptop with an Intel Arc 140T GPU on offer (the one used by the Intel Ultra i9 285H), you’re in for a bit of a treat.

Intel vs AMD: Battery Life

Battery stamina is yet another area where AMD usually obliterates Intel. Its laptops are often able to pare back performance to a level where you don’t notice the difference in day-to-day use, but it can still result in battery life in the teens of hours

And we had that before all this talk of “AI” processors and their feats of efficiency. Intel? Not so much.

The best results I saw was when using PC Mark’s Modern Office tool, which basically emulates what you might do while at the office (or working from home), including doing nothing but staring at the screen for stretches.

The MSI with the Intel Ultra 9 285H lasted an excellent 15 hours 47 minutes, compared to 13 hours 11 minutes from the AMD Ryzen laptop. It’s another pretty notable turnaround for Intel, given the number of Intel H-series laptops I’ve reviewed over the years that struggle to crack 5-6 hours of normal use.

This isn’t quite the victory it seems versus AMD, though. The Intel laptop, despite being far lighter, also has a bigger battery. A Windows 11 battery report suggests its real capacity is 97.5Wh, compared to 80.6Wh in the AMD-powered laptop.

Guess what? That pretty much makes up the entire difference in runtime. It’s still a neat win for Intel versus its own older generations, though, and does show what a concerted focus on efficiency can do for you even in a performance PC.

The Intel Ultra 9 285H is rated as a 45W processor as standard. That would eat up a 97.5Wh battery in much more than two hours. It can sip the juice when it needs to.

Intel vs AMD: AI Smarts

We’re in an era of AI obsession. And the folks who make tech are even more hooked on the stuff than us ordinary folks.

Neither of these Intel Ultra or AMD Ryzen processors is truly AI-packed, though, compared to a laptop with a “made for AI” Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chipset. And neither of our testers here is a CoPilot+ laptop.

That’s a Microsoft standard that, among other elements, demands “40 TOPS” of AI performance from the neural processing unit (NPU). Intel doesn’t even try to mask how far the Intel Ultra 285H is from reaching that goal, listing the NPU as having 13 TOPS.

AMD claims the Ryzen Ultra has “up to 50” NPU TOPS. But based on our testing it’s only slightly ahead of Intel’s, by around 17-20%.

When you see super-high TOPS figures in these laptops, it’s often because it’s using the combined AI power of the NPU, the CPU and the GPU. For the AI jobs of the future, we really want the NPU to be going most of the work. While a graphics card, or even one of the “integrated” chipsets seen here, can pump out loads of TOPS, it’s going to use loads more energy than an NPU.

That’s kinda the point of these under-the-spotlight pieces of hardware. They’re primed for AI-related tasks and won’t engage fans, rinse the battery and heat up the laptop too much while working. And, well, neither of these Intel or AMD lines are top of their game in this area yet.

Intel vs AMD: Compatibility?

We are currently in an era of disruptive processors that claim to perform AI miracles, and net you super-long battery life thanks to their phone-inspired architectures. Just one problem: you can’t always be sure if apps will run. At all.

There’s none of that malarkey with the AMD Ultra 9 365 AI and Intel Ultra 285H. They are both, at heart, built on the x86 system architecture that has been the norm basically since the cavemen were about. Okay, so since the 1970s.

There are some kinda interesting compatibility differences on the gaming side, though. The Intel Ultra 285H supports XeSS, Intel’s upscaling tech, while the AMD Ultra 9 AI has to make do with FSR 3. This is AMD’s own tech, but it can be used across different graphics chipsets.

They are both used to improve performance in games that support them, by actually rendering the game at a lower resolution, and using AI/machine learning to bump up the difference.

XeSS can look better than FSR in quite a few games. But FSR will often provide better frame rates, and even has a frame generation feature. Perhaps more important is how well driver support will pan out over the years of these processors’ lifespans. That’s something we’re yet to discover.

Intel vs AMD: Verdict

The Intel Ultra 9 285H is more interesting than the AMD Ryzen processor laptop I've used here. But it’s mostly because we finally have what feels like Intel’s proper riposte to what have traditionally been AMD’s strengths: battery life and integrated graphics performance.

Let’s not get things twisted, though. Intel doesn’t seem to have leapfrogged over AMD for battery life at this level. But gaming performance is really quite impressive, with major frame rate leads in loads of popular games that make them pretty enjoyable on what is not far off a pure business laptop.

Intel has the edge for processor power too, although when a good chunk of the gap can be made up by upgrading to the step-up AMD AI 9 375, it’s not hugely interesting.

It does mean the often lower cost of AMD-powered laptops is the one advantage I can really point to in this class. If you find a couple of laptops where price isn’t a factor and the CPU is the only dividing point, I’d pick the Intel this time around. But, let’s be honest, when is money not an issue?