I tested the Ryzen AI 400 for battery life. AMD, we have a problem  | amznusa.com

AMD’s Ryzen mobile processors appear in about a third of all productivity laptops sold today. So, how does the Ryzen AI 400, AMD’s latest mobile processor, actually hold up in real-world battery tests? Well, the results aren’t encouraging.

If you’ve followed my earlier tests, you know that our traditional metric—looping a recorded video over and over until it runs out of battery—is a bit outdated. More people stream video instead, keeping the screen, processor, and Wi-Fi radio on.

So, my new rundown test is anchored on streaming and it just so happens I use the anime One Piece, which my kids introduced me to.

AMD

For this round of testing, I’m using Acer’s Swift Go 14 AI with a Ryzen AI 7 445 chip inside. The Ryzen AI 7 445 is a midrange chip with 6 cores and 12 threads. The Ryzen 9 HX 475 (not tested) sits at the top of AMD’s performance stack, with 12 cores and 24 threads.

But performance isn’t the point here. Battery life is. So, let’s see how this Ryzen performs.

The contenders:

• Acer Swift Go 14 AI (Ryzen AI 7 445, 1920×1200 display, 65Wh battery)
• Asus Zenbook S16 (AMD Ryzen AI 9 365, 2880×1800 display, 78Wh battery) Note: Our original platform test used a Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 instead.
• Asus Zenbook Duo (Intel Core Ultra X9 388H, 2880×1800 display, 99Wh battery)
• Asus Zenbook S 14 (Intel Core Ultra 7 258V, 2880×1800 display, 72Wh battery)
• Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 (Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite, 2304×1536 display, 54Wh battery)
• Asus Zenbook A16 (Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme X2E94100, 2880×1800 display, 73Wh battery)

My test is simple. I set the laptop’s display to a fixed brightness, unplug the cord, and stream episode after episode of One Piece until it runs out of battery power. The results are clear and they don’t favor the Ryzen AI 7 445, which sits at the bottom of the chart.

Mark Hachman / Foundry

Of course, battery size bears relevance too. Quite obviously, the Intel Core Ultra 300 processor (Panther Lake) benefits from its massive 99Wh battery, the largest the government allows inside of a laptop. This one is the big winner.

We can compensate for that by dividing the battery life by the size of the battery in watt-hours. The result is a measure of how efficient the mobile processor is, which is the answer we’re looking for anyway. Here are those results, and the Snapdragon X Elite takes first place:

Mark Hachman / Foundry

The problem for AMD? Neither the raw battery life nor the efficiency score favor AMD. In fact, the opposite is true. We saw something like that with the evaluation of the Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme. Qualcomm focused on performance, and battery life suffered in comparison to the rather stellar Snapdragon X Elite. Next up is likely Intel’s budget platform, Wildcat Lake.

I haven’t formally reviewed the Ryzen AI 400 CPU, but one of our writers, Matthew Smith, did in his review of the Lenovo IdeaPad 5a 2-in-1. Unfortunately, his conclusion was called out correctly in the headline: “A good laptop with a slow CPU.”

Neither the battery life scores nor Smith’s review leave much room for optimism about AMD’s chip. You’re probably better off looking to either Qualcomm or Intel for the processor inside your next productivity laptop.