What is the diff between the two CPU’s offered. I am not familiar with either
thanks
dan
Imo, we’ve passed an inflection point recently with the launch of Intel’s Panther Lake.
But it’s a complex topic and not really as clear cut as “use X for this, and Y for that”, so would encourage you to research beyond this forum.
I went Intel, because I wanted to prioritise battery life and GPU compute and Intel seem to lead here currently (as long as you get one of the X chips). Intel also offers true Thunderbolt 4, rather than just USB4.
However, AMD has a more established platform with a more straightforward architecture and (probably, hopefully?) better software support simply because it has been out longer. It also uses much cheaper, more easily available RAM, if that is an issue for you.
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Thanks
dan
The biggest driver for me to go with Intel this time is battery life and a lack of a deep sleep option with AMD. I’ve had both of the previous generation AMD boards in my daily driver 13 and could never get hibernation working reliably on linux and the sleep state available would drain the battery completely overnight.
I’m keeping the AMD 13 for a dev/ work laptop, but moving my daily driver to the Intel 13 pro.
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The Intel model should have a bigger RAM bandwidth and lower idle power consumption, and should also theoretically have a better GPU, but Intel GPU drivers are probably still not as mature as AMD’s.
I got the AMD because “ships in September” vs “ships in November” matters a lot while my current laptop is self destructing.
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Even though the AI 300 is two years old now, it’s still a beefy GPU. I’d be surprised if the Intel was much faster in real-world tests. (and this is frustrating… the newer system should be MUCH faster!)
Memory bandwidth is roughly the same too (90 GB/s vs 110ish GB/s)
That said, personally I went Intel because of my kid’s FW 12… it sleeps and wakes every time and barely sips battery. My AI 300 guzzles battery (gone in 4-6 hours) and fails to resume maybe every 20 wakeups. AMD is still chasing software gremlins.
We’ll see if the Intel FW 13 is as rock solid as the 12 … and I bet it will be even better.
I personally went with a x9 32gb config, as I only get about 2, maybe 3, hours of battery life on my 16" r9 with dgpu just web browsing on windows. I love my 16" and I was in batch 4 of the original preorder, but the battery and build quality were frankly a bit rough. When I heard about the 13 pro launch, the smaller form factor, better build quality, haptic touchpad and the BATTERY LIFE were the big parts that made me want it. Preordered before the livestream ended and I have had my device for about a month now. I can go multiple days on a single charge at college now, I got screwed twice when I forgot to charge my 16" the night before and had a dead laptop with no charger (btw the 100 watt adapter supports usb pd pps which means quick charging 2.0 on samsung devices, the 240 watt adapter supports the other higher voltage version of pps, cant remember what it is called, but it does not 2.0 fast charge my phone or tablet). I can now easily get 10+ hours reliably on a charge, something that even new my 16" couldn’t dream of doing. I average something like 2-5 watts on the cpu and less then 8 watts average total system on min backlight and useable brightness (currently at 15%). To cut it a bit shorter, I feel intels panther lake (the core ultra series 3 chips) are the first compelling upgrade from when pheonix (ryzen 7040) released 3 years ago. Even with linux installed on my 16" I couldn’t get below a 13 watt draw on the battery which lead to a 6 hour battery life. Hopefully this helps and feel free to ask any other questions you have and I’ll do my best to answer them.
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I actually went from an AMD 300 board to an intel X7 board specifically because the highly praised 890m iGPU was an absolute thermal nightmare to deal with, and believe me, I tried a lot to fix it. It may be relatively close to the B390 on the intel board in some arbitrary peak performance metrics, but what good are those if in practical usage, it consistently sh*ts the bed after five minutes of sustained use because it runs way too hot for an ultrabook-style laptop?
But I’m happy to report that it’s a completely different story with the intel iGPU, where Overwatch on low-medium settings (my own informal benchmark, if you will) just keeps humming along indefinitely on 120 fps. So no, I really can’t recommend those AMD boards to anyone who wants to game on their FW13 in environments not restricted to industrial freezers and the Siberian tundra. Right now, there’s only one option for that.
And that’s not to mention battery life as the other majorly important metric, of course, where the AMD boards are simply awful.
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Interesting. I’d have figured the Intel GPU to be the more power hungry one considering my prior experience with the 7840HS and Core 9 285H (on different laptops), where the former actually ran quite efficiently and even power capped to around 20W would give me 95% of the perf, whilst the latter wasn’t as well behaved. I thought one of the selling points of the 890m over the 780m was even higher power efficiency with RDNA 3.5. Phoronix appears to confirm this too https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-radeon-890m-rdna35/2
For the Framework 13 or Framework 13 Pro frame the intel hands down. It is a mobile device battery life should be paramount, that being said it is no slouch in performance. I did a deep dive on the AMD as an option and none of data worked for pretty much any use case outside of what I would offload to a server for. I don’t want a full scale mirror of my work environment running on my laptop as a dev environment and that was the only case where I could see the AMD AI300 series chips working for me. Also I simply could not get around the idle power usage on the AMD boards having what appeared to be a 5w minimum. I get under 4w with my current 12th gen Intel and that is full system draw. So I ordered the Intel ultra x7 358h board, and expect to be dropping that in later today. My workloads are mostly typical desktop office tasks, terminal usage, ide usage, container builds, initial container tests, and once things are working that way they get shoved into a kubernetes environment running on my infrastructure (i.e. workstations being used as homelab servers / no real thermal or power constraints) for further refinement.
I am biased though, I have a strongly opinionated viewpoint that laptops are mobile first, and that means battery life is always one of my top concerns. The second a workload starts guzzling power for extended periods it is time to turn it into a remote workload by offloading it to something without the battery life concern.
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Hi Dan,
The Framework Laptop 13 Pro is available with the Intel Ultra 3 series and AMD AI 300 series chips though there still is the availability of the Framework Laptop 13 (before the Pro model was created) with the AMD AI 300 series chips.
Both are very capable platforms and others have touted the newest benefits of the battery life on the latest Intel Pro board which is a big jump since there were no Ultra 200 boards offered by Framework.
On the AMD Pro side there is only two boards offered the AI 7 350 and the AI 9 HX 370. These are closer to the upper offerings of the Intel Pro series boards Ultra X7 358H and the Ultra X9 388H.
If the newest display with touch, and extra battery life are not critical the regular Laptop 13 uses the same boards, plus the AMD boards uses memory people can actually purchase instead of the nearly impossible to find LPCAMM2 modules on the Intel board.
Some of it is personal preference as they both excel at being a great platform for a laptop.
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So got it installed. Night and day. Measured power draw with firefox, evolution, and a terminal, 35% display brightness on the original matte display, wifi on, bluetooth off…barely over 2w. Youtube 5w…down from 11w. Better than I could have wished for. Ran rpm-ostree upgrade and the fan does not lose its mind. Lightning fast even on battery. Very happy so far. Looking forward to buying the pro chassis when it eventually becomes available.
I went with the Intel mainboard because:
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Intel worked with Framework to perform hardware optimization, meaning that we can expect the best interop and utilization optimization here (translates to: better manage of resources and as a result, better battery life)
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Intel provides actual TB4, which means I can get better performance with an eGPU, which suits my particular needs (my workstation/daily driver must be a laptop, but when at home I do primarily dock it and want to take advantage of an eGPU).
I currently have a Ryzen 9 HX 370 that I purchased in November 2025. Normally, I wouldn’t be upgrading the system so soon (historically I’ve averaged a 3 year cycle), but the above two points are high enough priorities that I made the decision to.
That said, I only ordered the mainboard and memory. I’m waiting for the silver pro chassis to become available, at which point I’ll put it all together and sell my ryzen system as a complete unit for… not that much less than what I’m spending on the new pro system, to be honest.
Why would it be hotter if the TDP is the same (or slightly lower than) the earlier 7840U’s 780M?
I should rephrase: The HX 370 chip as a whole runs a lot hotter than the X7 358H chip - I guess it’s another case of a chipmaker pushing an aging architecture too far to deliver incremental gains off its back for a few more generations. Certainly, that’s something intel’s been guilty of many times as well.
But you’re right, I don’t know whether or not the 890m is the maker of its own thermal demise on these boards, but it also doesn’t really matter if all you want is a powerful, reliable laptop that doesn’t fold like a napkin when faced with sustained loads longer than a few minutes.
According to the review, the X7 358H also runs hotter than the 7840U, so the (out of stock unfortunately) 7840U is the coolest despite using an older radiator (2 small heat pipe vs 1 large heat pipe) and the same single fan.
Edit: I saw a post a while ago claiming repasting PTM7950 is somewhat cooler than the original PTM7958 on the Pro mainboard, but I can’t find the exact link
On OP’s topic. The Intel version has better performance and much lower unloaded power consumption, at the cost of exorbitant RAM price. The AMD AI 300 series has marginal improvement of CPU and GPU(only the top-end 890M) over the previous 7040U. They use different hardware acceleration drivers so upgrading the mainboard while using the same disk isn’t going to work from the get go and manual re-installation of the driver(s) is needed, otherwise it’ll drain 20W playing videos.
The SoC itself has memory compression which improves bandwidth in many scenarios by 25% or more.
The iGPU itself has bigger cache, and improved hidden surface removal which both reduce memory bandwidth usage. That’s how with similar bandwidth it can outperform the predecessor by 50-70%. The predecessor is similar to AMD.
Despite not having Memory on Package and expensive PMICs, it achieves similar or lower power than predecessor Lunarlake.
Intel really executed well with Pantherlake.
Which CPU has the highly praised 890m iGPU?
thanks
dan
The HX 370
Welcome to the community, @Zephyr! 
The degree to which each processor manufacturer are corporate monstrosities, and how to estimate the least worst, has been covered in other threads. Somewhere on this forum it has been discussed how each company has deleted instruction sets and processor features they no longer wish to support via a BIOS update, and they sneak that in via a security update that generally can’t be avoided.
Thus, sad to say, if TPTB can get to Intel to install a backdoor, I should think they can get to AMD. Just look at the number of printer manufacturers who quietly installed tracking dot technology.