As an end-of-year tradition at Phoronix for running a lot of year-over-year comparison performance benchmarks and other long-term performance evaluations, it’s typically done on the higher-end hardware. That’s done for a matter of time savings with maximum performance when running often 100~200+ benchmarks per article, the highest-end hardware typically being the most interesting in terms of features and capabilities, and more often than not getting flagship hardware review samples as opposed to the lower-end hardware. There have been benchmarks recently showing the big gains for AMD EPYC from a one year Linux LTS kernel upgrade, Intel Granite Rapids over the past year, and even the AMD Milan-X performance over the last four years, among other end-of-year 2025 articles. Today is a look at how the AMD Ryzen AI 5 “Krackan Point” CPU/iGPU performance has evolved simply over the last six months. It was a rather surprising twist how much better the Linux performance is over simply the past six months.
Back in July I had bought an HP OmniBook 5 laptop powered by the AMD Ryzen AI 5 340. I was curious about the performance of AMD’s “Krackan Point” with these laptops at the time being found in the sub-$500 space. Occasionally with various online deals I still see some Krackan Point / Ryzen AI 5 340 laptops in the sub-$500 space but with the increased memory and storage prices over the back half of the year, pricing is under increased pressure. For just $449 USD getting a 6-core / 12-thread Zen 5 CPU with AVX-512, integrated Radeon 840M graphics, 16-inch 1200p display, and 16GB of LPDDR5-7500 memory.
For the $449 price of the HP OmniBook 5 Laptop 16z-ag100 8DF4 it delivered nice performance in my Krackan Point evaluation back in July. With the end of year upon us and deciding what else to run for some end-of-year comparisons, I dusted off this HP OmniBook 5 to see how the performance has evolved in just the past half-year since buying this budget laptop over the summer.
Back in July the HP OmniBook 5 with AMD Ryzen AI 5 340 was tested with Ubuntu 25.04 on the Linux 6.14 kernel and other Ubuntu 25.04 defaults. For looking at the state of the Ryzen AI 5 340 Krackan Point hardware at the end of 2025, I installed Ubuntu 25.10 plus upgrading to Linux 6.18.1 stable and the Mesa 26.0-devel graphics drivers. Besides jumping from Linux 6.14 to Linux 6.18, there was also GCC 14.2 to GCC 15.2 and other important software updates incorporated into Ubuntu Linux over the second half of the year.
With the same hardware, the performance uplift simply over this second half of 2025 was surprising to find out of a sub-$500 AMD Zen 5 laptop.
