Ryzen 9 8945HS: CPU benchmarks and laptop guide

The AMD Ryzen 9 8945HS is the Hawk Point flagship — an 8-core Zen 4 design from the 2023 Ryzen 8000 generation that topped AMD's refreshed premium stack. The catalog matches it to 16 models, and it meets the recommended CPU requirement in 68 of the 69 games the site tracks. This guide covers where the chip sits among laptop CPUs, what it brings to a portable, and which laptops carry it.

Where the Ryzen 9 8945HS sits in 2026

A catalog score of 87.2 places the chip 24th of 672 scored laptop CPUs — the top few percent of a table that spans two decades of silicon. The neighborhood: the Ryzen 9 7940HS (88), Ryzen AI 7 350 (87.9) and Core i5-14500HX (87.6) just above, the Core Ultra 9 185H (87) and Ryzen 7 7840HS (86.5) alongside, and the Ryzen 7 8845HS (86.3) just below. That its own predecessor, the 7940HS, still ranks above it tells the real story — the refresh moved the badge more than the performance, and the whole cluster sits within 1.7 points of each other.

What the chip brings

Hawk Point-HS is an 8-core, 16-thread Zen 4 design built on a 4 nm process and rated at 45 W in its HS-class configuration: a 4.0 GHz base clock and up to 5.2 GHz boost. The integrated Radeon 780M runs at up to 2,800 MHz, which matters for the Vivobook- and Swift-class machines in this roster that ship without discrete graphics. In public benchmarks the chip posts 2,356 single-core and 11,387 multi-core in Geekbench. Memory support and cache details were not captured for this chip, so the table above sticks to what the catalog verifiably holds.

Games: CPU-side readiness

Measured purely as a processor, the chip clears the recommended CPU tier for 68 of 69 cataloged games — from Cyberpunk 2077, Baldur's Gate 3, Elden Ring and Red Dead Redemption 2 at the demanding end through Helldivers 2, Alan Wake 2, Ghost of Tsushima, Black Myth Wukong and Counter-Strike 2 down to the lightest esports entries. Starfield is the single holdout, listing the chip above its minimum but below its recommended CPU requirement. These verdicts are CPU-only — whether a game actually plays well depends on the laptop's GPU and RAM, and that is where the machines carrying this chip vary most.

Laptops that carry it

The 16-model roster is entirely 2024: OMEN 17 machines at $1,509 and $1,713 at the top, the HP ZBook Power 16 G11 and ZBook Firefly 14 G11 at $1,408 covering workstations, and the gaming midrange in the ASUS TUF Gaming A15, ROG Zephyrus G14 and Acer Nitro 16 at $1,152 each. The thin-and-light side is well represented — the Vivobook S 15 OLED and S 16 OLED at $650 each, the Vivobook S 14 OLED and Acer Swift Go 14 at $1,084, and the MSI Thin A15 at $650. Roster medians describe the fleet honestly: office comfort at a perfect 100, a gaming index of 82 and a performance index of 80.5, while mobility at 44.5 and portability at 34.8 spread the fleet from OLED ultrabooks to 17-inch gaming chassis.

Bottom line

The Ryzen 9 8945HS suits a buyer who wants the 2024 shopping-list version of AMD's premium 8-core: recommended-tier CPU readiness for everything tracked except Starfield, and the widest spread of chassis in this family — $650 OLED ultrabooks through $1,700 17-inch gaming machines. Since the predecessor 7940HS ranks marginally higher here, the right question per listing is what GPU and RAM the price includes, not which Hawk Point badge is on the sticker.