AMD’s third shoe finally drops at CES 2020—7nm Zen 2 mobile CPUs
AMD's finally bringing Zen 2 to mobile, with the first laptops available in Q1, and more than 100 systems expected in 2020. [credit: AMD ]
AMD has really been bringing the heat to Intel this year, with incontestable wins for its 7nm CPUs in the desktop space, high-end desktop space, and server space. The one thing everybody has been waiting with bated breath for is mobile-while Intel brought limited supplies of high-performance 10nm Ice Lake parts to market, AMD has remained pretty silent about mobile. The most I could ever get out of my AMD folks was a sort of "we can't talk about that yet," with suspicious little yellow feathers floating out of their mouths, but no real detail.
Yesterday at CES, that final shoe dropped-Ryzen 4000 mobile is here, and it brings AMD's recent trademark of high core and thread counts and jaw-dropping low TDPs to the mobile arena. The flagship U-series part, Ryzen 4800u, offers eight cores/16 threads on only 15W TDP, and although we've got nobody's word for it yet but AMD Performance Labs', it appears to whip the high-end Ice Lake i7-1065G7 solidly across the board in tests ranging from Cinebench R20 to 3DMark, Adobe Premiere, and more.
Of course, performance is only half the battle in ultralight form factors-power consumption is the other. It shouldn't be any surprise that AMD is showing massive performance-per-watt increases over the first two generations of mobile Ryzen, given those performance numbers with a 15W TDP. The bigger question-and one that can't be so quickly answered-is how well Ryzen 4000 series systems will idle. And unfortunately, that's not a question AMD can entirely control themselves.
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