AMD announced its Ryzen 4000 mobility CPU lineup for laptops at CES last month. The company has been on a roll for the past couple of years giving a very tough time to the likes of Intel and NVIDIA. AMD has been extremely impressive so far at competing both in the GPU space and the CPU space against the giants and it looks like they have no intentions of stopping any time soon.
With its updated Ryzen 4000 series, AMD is hoping to bring a much-needed Zen 2 based refresh to laptops as well. While the previous Ryzen 2000 and Ryzen 3000 mobility processors have also been very successful and popular, they have somewhat started to show their age, especially against Intel’s new 10th Generation Ice Lake CPUs.
New laptops with Zen 2 based Ryzen 4000 APUs are expected to come out in a month or two with an increase in performance in basically all departments, including the already great Vega graphics. However, a new leak suggests that these processors could actually be more potent than our previous predictions.
Ryzen 5 4500U based laptop tested – On par with a 95W Intel Core i5-9600K
The new leak comes from benchmark tests that were conducted on a laptop equipped with the new Ryzen 5 4500U CPU. The laptop in question here is the Acer Swift 3 S314-42, which is supposed to come out later this month. It features the newly announced AMD ‘Renoir’ Ryzen 5 4500U CPU which is based on AMD’s already successful Zen 2 architecture.
The Ryzen 5 4500U comes with 6 cores and 6 threads and has a base clock of 2.3 GHz that can get boosted up to 4.0 GHz. In terms of cache, the 4500U comes with 8 MB of L3 and 3 MP of L2 cache. However, the most impressive part is that the processor manages to run all of these cores at a very low 15W TDP.
On the graphics side, the Ryzen 5 4500U is paired with the new 7nm Vega 6 graphics with 384 cores and a clock that goes up to 1500 MHz. The processor is an answer to Intel’s new 10nm Ice Lake-U and 14nm Comet Lake-U processors for laptops. However, the graphics have always been superior on Ryzen and the new Vega 6 will probably extend that gap.
Initial benchmarks are extremely promising for the future of AMD based laptops
Apart from the the Ryzen 4500U processor, the new Acer Swift that was tested comes with 8 GB of LPDDR4 RAM and a 256 GB M.2 SSD so very mid-range specs. The price isn’t astronomically high either coming in at only $700 for a processor that would probably knock the competition out of the water.
NotebookCheck did a handy comparison between the new Ryzen processor and its Intel counterparts. When compared with the older 8th Gen Intel processors like the Quad Core Intel Core i5-8250U, the AMD Ryzen 4500U comes out on top with a massive performance gain of 50%. While we don’t have any comparisons with the newer 10th Gen Ice Lake or Comet Lake CPUs, it would be fair to assume that AMD would still have a lead over its Intel counterparts.
As for the benchmarks themselves, the AMD Ryzen 5 4500U performs exceptionally well in CPU-z tests. In terms of individual tests, the 4500U scored a single core score of 4282 and a multi-core score of 1074 on GeekBench 5. The processor also managed to break the 5000 point barrier in PCMark 10.
These scores are very impressive especially when we compare them to even some of Intel’s desktop CPUs. According to these tests, the Ryzen 5 4500U is roughly on par with the Intel Core i5-9600K which is a 95W desktop CPU; insane.
You can check out the rest of the CPU benchmarks down below:
As for the GPU, the results are even more promising than what we were hoping for. Intel introduced it’s Iris plus graphics alongside the 10th Gen Ice Lake CPUs to close the gap to AMD’s exceptional mobile Vega graphics. However, it looks like it’s Intel’s time to play catch-up again as the new Vega 6 graphics are 60% more powerful than their Ryzen 3000 counterparts.
In terms of real life usage, this means that Ryzen 4500U’s Vega 6 GPU should be able to run most games at 1080p with middling frame rates with better results at 720p. Most eSports oriented games like CS Go or Rocket League should be a piece of cake for the 4500U. For more demanding games though, you might have to turn the settings down a notch.
As far as the GPU benchmarks are concerned, the Vega 6 graphics manage to achieve a pretty respectable 3DMark DX12 score of 947 and a 3DMark DX11 score of 9485.
Overall, the results are very promising and suggest a bright future for affordable and powerful AMD powered laptops. However, this isn’t limited to Windows machines as some new rumors point towards Apple also making AMD based variants for its upcoming Macbooks for 2020. You can check out the full lineup of AMD Ryzen 4000 CPUs down below.
| Processor | Cores / Threads | Base Clock | Boost Clock | GPU CUs / SPs | TDP |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AMD Ryzen 9 4900H | 8 / 16 | TBD | TBD | TBD | 45W |
| AMD Ryzen 7 4800H | 8 / 16 | 2.9 GHz | 4.2 GHz | 8 / 512 | 45W |
| AMD Ryzen 5 4600H | 6 / 12 | 3.0 GHz | 4.0 GHz | 6 / 384 | 45W |
| AMD Ryzen 7 4800U | 8 / 16 | 1.8 GHz | 4.2 GHz | 8 / 512 | 15W |
| AMD Ryzen 7 4700U | 8 / 8 | 2.0 GHz | 4.1 GHz | 7 / 448 | 15W |
| AMD Ryzen 5 4600U | 6 / 12 | 2.1 GHz | 4.0 GHz | 6 / 384 | 15W |
| AMD Ryzen 5 4500U | 6 / 6 | 2.3 GHz | 4.0 GHz | 6 / 384 | 15W |
| AMD Ryzen 3 4300U | 4 / 4 | 2.7 GHz | 3.7 GHz | 5 / 320 | 15W |
AMD is literally everywhere these days whether it is desktops, laptops or gaming consoles. The company has been consistently hitting home runs and it all seems to paying off now. With Ryzen 4000, we can expect AMD’s growth to accelerate even more.
AMD’s first Ryzen 4000 based laptops are expected to be shipped in Q1 2020 with more than 100 models planned throughout the year.