A Ryzen 4000 APU leak is making its rounds on the web now. The part, codenamed “Renoir” was spotted with performance benchmarks on 3DMark. Renoir isn’t expected to land in consumer hands until mid to late 2020. What exactly are we looking at, here?
For starters, Renoir will move APUs down to the 7nm process node as well. As of now, Picasso APUs are based on the second-gen Zen+ core, built on the 12nm node, in contrast to the Ryzen 3000 CPUs that are built on the 7nm Zen 2 design. The move to 7nm and Zen 2 alone is expected to result in significant CPU-side gains for Renoir. We saw this earlier with the transition from Ryzen 2000 to Ryzen 3000: A combination of higher clocks and higher IPC meant made the 3000 parts far more powerful and versatile. Renoir would also feature an updated GPU. Existing Picasso APUs use Vega 11 and Vega 8, which offer performance in the range of the GTX 1050 Ti and GTX 1030 respectively. While the leak doesn’t indicate what GPU is in use exactly, it’s quite possible that Renoir might utilize a cut-down Little Navi. Now let’s look at the 3DMark leak itself.
We’re looking at 3DMark 11 scores that were spotted by the folks over at Techpowerup. There were 3 different Renoir configurations they spotted. CPU clocks in the first case were at 1.7 GHz, leading us to believe that these were engineering samples being tested. Meanwhile, GPU clocks are at a more reasonable 1500 MHz. In the second configuration, we’re looking at a 1.8 GHz CPU clock with the GPU unlisted. The third configuration has a 2 GHz CPU with a lower-clocked 1.1 GHz GPU.
What else is interesting is the fact that memory clocks were at 2666 MHz. This indicates that Renoir will feature support for DDR4 RAM. High-frequency dual-channel RAM is a necessity for good graphics performance on APUs so this is fortunate. The 3DMark 11 scores aren’t particularly impressive by themselves, ranging from 3,143 to 2,374. These aren’t earth-shattering but they’re indicative of entry-level APU performance. We’re expecting Renoir to offer both CPU and GPU performance a good bit faster than Picasso: this might make min-spec 9th gen gaming a possibility, at least if you’re willing to stick to sub-1080p resolutions.
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