The AMD Ryzen 7 Extreme Edition (opens in new tab) made its first appearance in the wild back in May, courtesy of 3DMark. Today, NEC has confirmed the CPU's existence by listing it as a component inside its Lavie N15 laptop (opens in new tab).
According to the listing spotted by @momomo_us (opens in new tab), the Ryzen 7 Extreme Edition is an eight-core, 16-thread (opens in new tab) APU (opens in new tab) that likely belongs to Ryzen 4000 U-series (opens in new tab) (codename Renoir) family. Therefore, the 7nm octa-core processor should be based on the same Zen 2 CPU and Vega GPU microarchitectures as other chips in that lineup.
NEC keeps the details to a minimum, but states that the Ryzen 7 Extreme Edition comes with a 1.8 GHz base clock (opens in new tab) and 4.2 GHz boost clock. It would appear that AMD might have dialed back the boost clock a bit, since the Ryzen 7 Extreme Edition was boosting close to 4.3 GHz in the aforementioned 3DMark submission.
If NEC's information is accurate, the Ryzen 7 Extreme Edition would have the same base and boost clock speeds as the Ryzen 7 4800U, suggesting that the two are very close relatives if not the same chip.
AMD Ryzen 7 Extreme Edition Specifications
| Processor | Cores / Threads | Base / Boost Clock (GHz) | L2 / L3 Cache (MB) | Graphics Cores | Graphics Frequency (MHz) | TDP (W) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ryzen 7 Extreme Edition | 8 / 16 | 1.8 / 4.2 | ? | ? | ? | ? |
| Ryzen 7 4800U | 8 / 16 | 1.8 / 4.2 | 4 / 8 | 8 | 1,750 | 15 |
| Ryzen 7 4700U | 8 / 8 | 2.0 / 4.1 | 4 / 8 | 7 | 1,600 | 15 |
It's still unclear if the Extreme Edition actually brings any noticeable benefits over the Ryzen 7 4800U. However, there is one theory that could explain this Extreme chip's existence. The Ryzen 7 Extreme Edition could be equivalent to AMD's HS-series concept (opens in new tab).
In addition to launching the Ryzen 4000 H-series mobile processors, AMD also brought the HS-series to the market with its current this generation of APUs. With the exception of the Ryzen 9 model, the HS-series variants share the same clock speeds as their H-series counterparts but at a lower thermal envelope. The H-series CPUs have a 45W TDP (thermal design power) and 35W to 54W cTDP (configurable TDP) rating, but the HS-series strictly sticks to 35W.
In the U-series' case, the chips are already at 15W with a 10W to 25W cTDP, so perhaps the Ryzen 7 Extreme Edition has a higher TDP, maybe around 20W or at the maximum 25W. The clock speeds listed for the Ryzen 7 Extreme Edition are also identical to those of the Ryzen 7 4800U. If the Ryzen 7 Extreme Edition doesn't have higher clock speeds, than its only advantage could be more thermal headroom to sustain the boost clock speeds for a longer period of time.
It's also possible for the chip to come equipped with improved integrated graphics (opens in new tab), but nothing so far implies that.
There's still a lot that we don't know about the Ryzen 7 Extreme Edition. As new details continues to surface, we'll keep trying to put this puzzle together.
