AMD is quietly smashing Intel in the mobile chip game

Can we just take a moment to acknowledge that AMD is absolutely killing it in laptop chips right now? We spend a lot of time talking about the DIY desktop market in terms of individual silicon wins, but it's rare that we champion mobile CPUs specifically.

We generally talk in terms of the laptops themselves, and then secondarily what chips have been slapped inside them.

But, damn, the latest AMD mobile parts have been ace. I've recently checked out the Asus ROG Strix Scar 17(opens in new tab), the first of the new AMD Dragon Range gaming laptops I've seen. If you're wondering what the 'Dragon Range' thing is, you're probably not alone.

Dragon Range is AMD's codename for its high-performance Zen 4-based Ryzen 7000-series mobile processors. And it's not messing around. The top Ryzen 9 7945HX is a 16-core, 32-thread beast that positively chews through any number crunching tasks you could throw its way—and does so comfortably quicker than Intel's best.

Right now, there isn't anything Intel can offer in response to these chips. Even its most powerful processors are lagging behind the genuine 16-core Dragon Range chip, and its Meteor Lake chips are going to have to be damned good to be able to make a dent in AMD's current mobile dominance.

Well, in performance terms, at least. Intel still dominates in terms of the number of laptops that sport its chips, and is far more a visible presence at retail, too.

But when it comes to the handheld side of things, Intel's got nothing. It can maybe offer a chip with the same raw processing performance, but it doesn't have anything with an iGPU component that can actually deliver proper gaming performance. And I don't think Meteor Lake is going to be able to do that, especially not at the low power end of the market.