Ryzen 7 4700U: AMD's First Ever 8-Core APU

A Redditor has dug up a PCMark 10 result of the unreleased the Ryzen 7 4700U APU (Accelerated Processing Unit). The leaked Renoir chip is part of the upcoming Ryzen 4000-series APU lineup that's expected to land early next year and could paint a devastating picture for Intel's low-end processors. As it stands already, AMD's APUs put consistent pressure on Intel's lower-end parts, but moving forward to the Zen 2 microarchitecture, not to mention an eight-core die, puts Intel's Core i5 series firmly in the crosshairs. 

Renoir will finally bring AMD's APUs up to date. The new parts are reportedly based on the Zen 2 microarchitecture and TSMC 7nm process node. The processors would still employ Vega graphics, but will come with a significant core upgrade, as evidenced by the Ryzen 7 4700U.

The model name alone is a hint that the Ryzen 7 4700U is most likely the successor to the existing Ryzen 7 3700U. The new APU shows up on PCMark 10 with a whopping eight cores but lacks SMT (Simultaneous Multi-Threading). The Ryzen 7 4700U flaunts a 2 GHz base clock and 4.2 GHz boost clock. Being an unreleased processor, the final specifications may vary.

Even more fascinating is that the Ryzen 7 4700U allegedly continues to operate within a 15W envelope despite having double the cores of the Ryzen 7 3700U. This just goes to show that AMD's Zen 2 microarchitecture and TSMC's 7nm FinFET manufacturing process are a powerful combination that shouldn't be taken lightly.

Sadly, PCMark 10 misreported the Ryzen 7 4700U's iGPU (Integrated Graphics Processing Unit) clock speed. However, the software help us confirm Renoir's continued usage of Vega as the exhibited by the GFX902 ID. At this point, it's uncertain if the Ryzen 7 4700U will arrive with 10 or 11 Compute Units (CU).

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When it comes down to pure performance, the Ryzen 7 4700U obviously excels thanks to the core upgrade. The eight-core Renoir part outperforms the Ryzen 3 3700U by up to 17.9%, which is pretty impressive for a generation-over-generation upgrade.

In comparison to its rivals, the Ryzen 7 4700U delivers up to 13.2% and 2.8% higher performance than Intel's Core i7-10510U Comet Lake and Core i7-1065G7 Ice Lake processors, respectively. In Intel's defense, the Ryzen 7 4700U has eight cores and eight threads while the two aforementioned Intel chips only have four cores and eight threads to work with.

The PCMark 10 results show that only the six-core, 12-thread Core i7-10710U Comet Lake part is capable of holding off the Ryzen 7 4700U. The Renoir chip falls behind by a 11.5% margin.

Speculation around the hardware circles is that AMD could introduce a Ryzen 9 model, which doesn't seem implausible. The chipmaker can go at it in two ways: Either maintain the eight-core, eight-thread configuration and give it higher operating clocks or enable SMT. We're keeping our fingers crossed that AMD goes with the latter, but only time will tell.