Mysterious AMD Ryzen 7 Extreme Edition, Ryzen 9 4900U Chips Surface

It looks like AMD may be preparing a new, and more extreme, version of one its Ryzen 4000 mobile APUs. Hardware detective @TUM_APISAK unearthed 3DMark benchmark results today for a "Ryzen 7 Extreme Edition" CPU presumed to be Renoir.

It's weird seeing the words "Extreme Edition" in an AMD processor name. That naming is more of an Intel practice that dates all the way back to the Northwood Pentium 4 days.

In terms of design, the obscure Ryzen 7 APU checks in with eight CPU cores and 16 threads. It appears to operate with a 1,800 MHz base clock and 4,291 MHz boost clock. The low base clock is a hint that the APU is probably based off one of AMD's Ryzen 4000 U-series parts that run with a 15W TDP.

There are two Ryzen 7 SKUs in the mobile Renoir lineup, but only the Ryzen 7 4800U has a eight-core, 16-thread configuration. Therefore, we suspect the leaked APU is based of the Ryzen 7 4800U. The vanilla Ryzen 7 4800U has a 1,800 MHz base clock and 4,200 MHz boost clock. The Extreme Edition seems to come with a 100 MHz, higher boost clock.

Image 1 of 2

The Twitter user also reportedly found a Ryzen 9 4900U a few hours prior to tweeting about the Ryzen 7 Extreme Edition. Oddly enough, the Ryzen 9 4900U seemingly has identical specifications to the Ryzen 7 Extreme Edition.

There's a strong possibility that one, or maybe both, of the mysterious APUs were designed exclusively for Microsoft. AMD has produced custom-made APUs for Microsoft's Surface devices in the past. The personalized APUs were nearly identical to the original SKUs, but Microsoft's variant had one additional Vega Compute Unit (CU). Ryzen 3000 U-series (codename Picasso) chips originally maxed out at 10 CUs, and Microsoft's tailored-made APUs bumped the count up to 11. 

Howerver, AMD labeled Microsoft's APUs as "Surface Edition," not Extreme. By removing the Surface moniker from the APUs, AMD could potentially offer them to other customers as well.