AMD’s third shoe finally drops at CES 2020—7nm Zen 2 mobile CPUs

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  AMD's finally bringing Zen 2 to mobile, with the first laptops available in Q1, and more than 100 systems expected in 2020. [credit: AMD ]

AMD's really been bringing the heat to Intel this year, with uncontestable wins for its 7nm CPUs in the desktop space, high end desktop space, and server space. The one thing everybody's been waiting with bated breath for is mobile—while Intel brought limited supplies of high-performance 10nm Ice Lake parts to market, AMD has remained pretty silent about mobile. The most I could ever get out of my AMD folks was a sort of "we can't talk about that yet" with suspicious little yellow feathers floating out of their mouths, but no real detail.

Yesterday at CES, that final shoe dropped—Ryzen 4000 mobile is here, and it brings AMD's recent trademark of high core and thread counts and jaw-dropping low TDPs to the mobile arena. The flagship U-series part, Ryzen 4800u, offers 8C/16T on only 15W TDP, and although we've got nobody's word for it yet but AMD Performance Labs', it appears to whip the high end Ice Lake i7-1065G7 solidly across the board in tests ranging from Cinebench R20 to 3DMark, Adobe Premiere, and more.

Of course, performance is only half the battle in ultralight form factors—power consumption is the other. It shouldn't be any surprise that AMD's showing massive performance-per-watt increases over the first two generations of mobile Ryzen, given those performance numbers with a 15W TDP. The bigger question—and one that can't be so quickly answered—is how well Ryzen 4000 series systems will idle. And unfortunately, that's not a question AMD can entirely control themselves.

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