AMD's 7nm Ryzen 4000 laptop CPUs aim to steal Intel's performance crown

AMD will release seven Ryzen 4000 mobile CPUs with claims of performance leadership and more than 100 laptop models coming.

- Gordan Mah Ung

After snatching the performance crown from Intel on the desktop (go.pcworld.com/pfcr), AMD officially opened up a second front in the war at CES 2020, with a series of Ryzen 4000 laptop CPUs that look to outperform Intel’s best and brightest.

“In 2020, we will be introducing the best laptop processor ever built,” said AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su during the unveil.

The company detailed no less than seven consumer Ryzen 4000 processors, based on its 7nm Zen 2 cores. The new CPUs will come in both 15 watt “U-class” ultra-low power versions in thin and light laptops and “H-class” 45-watt gaming and content creation laptops.

The Ryzen 7 4800U is the top-end low power version, packing 8-cores and 16-threads. It will hit boost clock of 4.2GHz and have a base clock of 1.8GHz. The chip will feature eight compute units in its Radeon graphics cores, which—surprisingly—use an optimized version of the company’s 7nm Vega cores rather than being based on the company’s newest RDNA architecture.

AMD said a Ryzen 7 with 8 compute units actually outperforms its previous Ryzen 7 3000 mobile chips, which had 11 compute units. The newer Ryzen 7 4000’s graphics cores actually offer 59 percent more performance per compute unit over the older Ryzen 7 3000 offerings, the company stated.

AMD isn’t aiming at older Ryzen 7 3000 though. It’s finally hoping to dethrone Intel’s mobile chips, and if what AMD claims is true, it’s happening.

AMD said the Ryzen 7 4800U, for example, will offer about a 4 percent advantage over Intel’s most advanced 10nm-based Ice Lake Core i7-1065G7 in single-threaded performance. But single-threaded performance is just part of it.