As with every recent January announcement, AMD is also announcing their new APU lineup which will fill up much of the mobile market space going forward with many partnerships being forged in light of Intel’s current difficulties in providing new products. Its definitely a winning position for AMD and their new Renoir family of APUs hopes to deliver much to the mobile market to help them grow their adoption rate for mobile users as well.
Since the first Ryzen 2000 APUs came out first than actual Zen+ Ryzen 2000 CPUs, the Ryzen APUs always get the higher numbers but technically do not mean an advantage over their Zen2 counterparts. That would be when the CPUs come out for 4th-gen Ryzen. Anyway, the Ryzen 4000 APU family is split into multiple series: the U-series for ultrathin notebooks, the H-series for gamers and content creators and the Pro series for the professional market.
The Ryzen 4000 APUs still share the same 2nd-generation Ryzen architecture and is fabbed in the same 7nm process giving them the distinction of the first 7nm x86 mobile processors. All of the advantages of the latest Zen2 architecture plus the 7nm process has enabled AMD to push through with a more efficient processor which has been its weakness in previous generations for mobile. AMD is bolstering the product with the new 7nm Vega engine as well as SmartShift technology.
U Series
The U-series is comprised of customer configurable 12W to 15W parts of 4-core/4-threads models up to 8-core/16-threads. Some SKUs will have SMT (multithreading) disabled to allow custom OEM models.
Being built on 7nm, AMD has been able to pack more cores into the compact ultrathin segment and marks the first time octa-core multithreaded processors have been packed into ultrathin devices. The new Renoir U-series APUs also get a new 7nm Navi graphics engine claiming boost performance at a much more efficient power envelope. The new engine, AMD claims, allows them to reduce the number of Compute Units (CU) from 11 to 8 while still holding a significant performance advantage over Intel Ice Lake processors. The tweaked Vega architecture allowed AMD to push out 59% more performance per CU.
The Ryzen 4000 U-series APU line up is topped by the 8-core/16-thread Ryzen 7 4800U running at a 1.8Ghz base frequency and has a 4.2Ghz boost clock, still fitting in the 15W power envelope. The Vega graphics engine for the R7 4800U runs at 1750Mhz. This is joined by the Ryzen 7 4700U, Ryzen 5 4600U, Ryzen 5 4500U and the Ryzen 3 4300U. All of which are rated with a 15W TDP. Specs in the slide below:
In its performance previews, AMD showed off the Ryzen 7 4800U to Intel’s Ice Lake Core i7-1065G7 highlighting single-threaded, multi-threaded and graphics performance. AMD did use 3DMark Time Spy in its test, notable for being CPU-intensive, for these tests. Real-world 1080p gaming and creators workloads tests were also shared by AMD.
Power Efficiency
AMD’s 7nm process has been a hot point for these releases and the Ryzen 4000 APUs see AMD leverage further optimizations to provide better efficiency with AMD claiming a 20% reduction while still providing double the performance per watt. Power state improvements together with LPDDR4x memory allow the platform to yield further significant battery efficiency.
It is worth noting that the U-series were noted for these power saving details but the H-series did not.
H Series
The AMD Ryzen 4000 APU H-series is designed for higher 35W TDP rated devices and allows configurations up to 45W and a maximum of 54W peak power consumption.
The Ryzen 7 4800H heads the pack with 8-core/16-threads and is clocked at 2.9Ghz with a boost clock of 4.2Ghz. The chip comes with 7 compute units operating at 1600Mhz. The Ryzen 5 4600H is also detailed, having a 6-core/12-thread configuration running at a base 3.0Ghz and a Turbo frequency of 4.0Ghz. This model features a reduced 6 CU which run at a 1500Mhz clock.
AMD is being very confident with this release especially the Ryzen 7 4800H, being showed to perform much better than the Intel Core i7-9700K desktop processor in both gaming and creator workloads. The other workloads comparison showed the i7-9750H mobile processor being edged out by the R7 4800H.
Athlon for Mobile
AMD also keeps the Athlon series alive in mobile form. Brandishing the aging original Zen architecture, the AMD Athlon is aimed at value-based and entry-level consumers. The Athlon Gold and Athlon Silver will be seen in upcoming Chromebook models.