AMD MOBILES GO ZEN 2

Renoir brings healthy performance jump

AMD’S MOBILE CHIPS have generally taken second place to its desktop versions. No longer: AMD claims to have been working on “Renoir” since 2017, optimizing it for mobile work. The result is a carefully packaged chiplet design with up to eight 7nm Zen 2 cores and Vega-based graphics. Finally, AMD’s mobile chips have the latest silicon, with the attendant jump in IPC. A significant improvement over the 3000-series, which is hardly sparkling.

There’s the usual split: the U range for low-power work, with a TDP of 15W, and the beefier H and HS series, with a TDP of 35 or 45W. The initial range of nine starts with the Ryzen 3 4300U, with four cores and four threads, running at a base of 2.7GHz. Then there are three six-core Ryzen 5s: the 4500U has six threads; the 4600U and 4600H get the full 12. The pattern is repeated with the three eight-core Ryzen 7 versions, the 4700U having eight threads, the 4800U and 4800H getting 16. At the top of the 4000 tree we have the eightcore Ryzen 9 4800H and HS. The 4800H has a base clock of 3.3GHz, with a boost of up to 4.4GHz; the HS clocks at 3.0 and 4.3GHz respectively. Both have eight Vega graphics cores running at 1,750MHz.

AMD’s comparisons with an Intel Core i7-9750H show the 4800H beats it by 8–80 percent in a set of productivity benchmarks. It can give Intel’s i9-9980H something to think about, too, just leaving the i9-9980HK out of reach.

AMD chips tend to be used in generic laptop designs, while the high end was designed around Intel’s best—not helped by AMD’s reputation for poor battery life, which it claims to have addressed. Intel’s mobile parts are split between 10nm Ice Lake and 14nm Comet Lake, a choice of better GPU or CPU performance. AMD is about to give Intel the same headache it has given it in the desktop market.