CES 2020: AMD announces Ryzen 4000 mobile series processors

At CES today, AMD CEO, Dr. Lisa Su, proudly proclaimed that 2020 is going to be an even bigger year, with the company focused on delivering the very best, That battle is starting off in the laptop sector, with the brand new Ryzen 4000 mobile series processors, spearheaded by ‘the best laptop processor ever built'. 

AMD's Ryzen 4000 mobile series processors come in two flavours, a H-series (high power) and a U-series (low power). These chips are built using 7nm technology, with up to 8 cores and 16 threads, delivering new levels of performance in ultra-thin form factors and gaming laptops.

The Ryzen 7 4800U comes with eight Zen 2 cores, 16 threads, a 1.8GHz base speed, 4.2GHz boost speed, an additional eight ‘Radeon' cores for the integrated GPU and just a 15W TDP. Interestingly, the Radeon cores here are based on the Vega architecture but through some additional design work, AMD has managed to generate a 59% performance boost over the previous generation.

Compared against Intel's latest Core i7-1065G7 processor, the Ryzen 7 4800U delivers 28 percent better graphics performance in 3DMark Time Spy Extreme, 90 percent better multi-thread performance in Cinebench R20 nT and 4 percent better single-thread performance in Cinebench R20 1T. AMD's low-power chip also delivers bigger performance leads across productivity software, including a 49% performance advantage in Adobe Premiere Pro and a 40 percent advantage transcoding video with Handbrake.

Performance per watt versus 3rd Gen Ryzen Mobile processors is doubled. A chunk of this comes from benefits of using the 7nm process, delivering power savings for longer lasting battery life.

The first AMD Ryzen 4000 U-series laptops are due over the course of Q1 2020 and we'll be seeing a bunch of them announced this week at CES. Currently, AMD expects to have these chips inside over 100 different laptops by the end of the year.

The AMD Ryzen 4000 H-series is AMD's high power variant aimed at gamers and professional creators. At the top of the pile is the Ryzen 7 4800H, which also sports 8-cores and 16-threads but has a higher 45W TDP and 2.9GHz/4.2GHz base/boost clock speeds.

During AMD's presentation, we see slides that show that an Intel Core i7-9750H has roughly 26 percent lower performance than a desktop Intel Core i7-9700K. In order to deliver ‘desktop class' performance, AMD designed the Ryzen 7 4800H to beat that benchmark, delivering a 39 percent performance increase over the Core i7-9700K in a 3DMark Firestrike Physics test.

One of the very first laptops to sport the Ryzen 7 4800H is going to be the ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14, which we have more details on in our ASUS coverage HERE. Beyond the Zephyrus G14, we'll see other Ryzen 4800H powered gaming laptops over the course of this week.

These new Ryzen powered laptops will also benefit from a brand new AMD technology in development known as ‘Smart Shift'. The idea is that tasks can be dynamically shifted between the laptop's integrated CPU and GPU cores, generating a 10 to 12 percent performance boost at the push of a button. Smart Shift is still in development so these numbers are preliminary, but it will be interesting to see what sort of gains can be had by the time it ships.

Discuss on our Facebook page HERE.

KitGuru Says: AMD is making a big push in the laptop space this year and so far, the offerings sound very impressive. What do you all think of the new Ryzen 4000 mobile CPUs?

Become a Patron!