CES 2020: AMD Unveils Its Ryzen 4000 Laptop CPUs to Take on Intel

AMD claims its new flagship Ryzen 4000 processors will beat Intel's high-end in almost every performance metric.

AMD is finally stepping up its laptop game. During a CES 2020 keynote last night, CEO Lisa Su announced its Ryzen 4000 line, its 3rd generation chips designed to compete against 's high-end. They'll feature a U-series for ultrathin , an H series for and creations, and a Pro-series for ultra-thin professionals. In that U series is the flagship Ryzen 7 4800U, a 9 core 16 thread chip with a 1.8 GHz base clock and up to 4.2 GHz boost. It also holds 8 Radeon cores, which have been upgraded for 59% more performance. In real-world benchmarks, AMD claims this led to a 90% increase in multi-thread Cinebench R20 performance vs Intel's i7-1065G7 and 4% in single-thread. In terms of graphics, its testing saw a 28% performance increase in 3DMark Time Spy Extreme. Of course, these kind of benchmarks are usually the best-case scenario and can be weighted to favor Ryzen. Power draw is a little more black and white, though, and AMD is promising that its 3rd Gen processors have double the performance per watt in Cinebench.

The 45W H-Series

The 4800U is available announced for Lenovo's Yoga Slim 7, and AMD is promising dozens of OEM laptops with it in Q1. On the H-series side, AMD announced the flagship Ryzen 7 4800H, with 8C/12T at a base of 2.9 GHz and a boost of up to 4.2. This and the others in the H lineup will be 45W chips, rather than the 15W of the U-series. It'll also be offering slower variants of both lines:
Model Cores/ Threads Watts Boost / Base Frequency (GHz) GPU Cores L2 / L3 Cache (MB)
AMD Ryzen 7 4800H 8C/16T 45W Up to 4.2 / 2.9 GHz 7 12
AMD Ryzen 5 4600H 6C/12T 45W Up to 4.0 / 3.0 GHz 6 11
AMD Ryzen 7 4800U 8C/16T 15W Up to 4.2 / 1.8 GHz 8 12
AMD Ryzen 7 4700U 8C/8T 15W Up to 4.1 / 2.0 GHz 7 12
AMD Ryzen 5 4600U 6C/12T 15W Up to 4.0 / 2.1 GHz 6 11
AMD Ryzen 5 4500U 6C/6T 15W Up to 4.0 / 2.3 GHz 6 11
AMD Ryzen 3 4300U 4C/4T 15W Up to 3.7 / 2.7 GHz 5 6
AMD Athlon Gold 3150U 2C/4T 15W Up to 3.3 / 2.4 GHz 3 5
AMD Athlon Silver 3050U 2C/2T 15W Up to 3.2 / 2.3 GHz 2 5
Meanwhile, the company appears to be making progress on its integrated graphics offerings vs Intel. Though its U line has fewer compute cores than last-gen, it claims the 4800U will still beat Intel in many games. Rocket League it says runs at 110fps at low settings vs Intel's 80, while GTA V jumps from a barely playable 29 to a solid 53. If AMD's marketing is to be believed, things are looking very positive for the company. It's gone from being trounced by Intel processors 5 years ago to having a highly competitive product stack across , laptop, and consoles. Let's just hope that battery life holds up on the go.