AMD’s Mobile Revival: Redefining the Notebook Business with the Ryzen 9 4900HS (A Review)
by Dr. Ian Cutress on April 9, 2020 9:00 AM ESTTesting the Ryzen 9 4900HS Integrated Graphics
Under the hood of the Ryzen 9 4900HS, aside from the eight Zen 2 cores, is an enhanced Vega 8 graphics solution. For this generation of mobile processors, AMD is keeping the top number of compute units to 8, whereas in the previous generation it went up to Vega 11. Just by the name, one would assume that AMD has lowered the performance of the integrated graphics. This is not the case.
For the new Ryzen Mobile 4000 processors, the Vega graphics here are enhanced in three main ways over the previous generation. First is that it is built on the 7nm process node, and AMD put a lot of effort into physical design, allowing for a more optimized version that has a wider voltage/frequency window compared to the previous generation. Secondly, and somewhat connected, is the frequency: the new processors top out at 1750 MHz, rather than 1400 MHz, which would naturally give a simple 25 % boost with all other things being equal. Third on the list is memory, as the new platform supports up to DDR4-3200, rather than DDR4-2400, providing an immediate bandwidth boost which is what integrated graphics loves. There’s also the nature of the CPU cores themselves, having larger L3 caches, which often improves integrated graphics workloads that interact a lot with the CPU.
Normally, with the ASUS Zephryus G14, the switching between the integrated graphics and the discrete graphics should be automatic. There is a setting in the NVIDIA Control Panel to let the system auto-switch between integrated and discrete, and we would expect the system to be on the IGP when off the wall power, but on the discrete card when gaming (note, we had issues in our battery life test where the discrete card was on, but ASUS couldn’t reproduce the issue). In order to force the integrated graphics for our testing, because the NVIDIA Control Panel didn’t seem to catch all of our tests to force them onto the integrated graphics, we went into the device manager and actually disabled the NVIDIA graphics.
This left us with AMD’s best integrated graphics in its Ryzen Mobile 4000 series: 1750 MHz of enhanced Vega 8 running at DDR4-3200.
Renoir with Vega 8 – updated to 20.4 after this screenshot was taken
Our comparison point here is actually a fairly tricky one to set up. Unfortunately we do not have a Ryzen 7 3750H from the previous generation for comparison, but we do have an Honor Magicbook 14, which has a Ryzen 5 3500U.
Picasso with Vega 8
This is a 15 W processor, running at 1200 MHz and DDR4-2400, which again makes the comparison a little tricky, but it is better than comparing it to the Intel HD630 graphics in the Razer Blade.
We also re-ran the benchmarks on the latest drivers with AMD's 65 Desktop APUs, the Ryzen 5 3400G (with Vega11) and the Ryzen 3 3200G (with Vega 8). These are running at DDR4-2933, the AMD maximum officially supported by these APUs (which means anything above this is overclocking).
This is a pretty substantial difference, no joke.
Hopefully we will get more variants of the Ryzen integrated graphics to test, along with an Ice Lake system.
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Kishoreshack - Monday, April 13, 2020 - link
@ian cuttresWhy soo harsh on AMD?
Its outdoing intel processor which draw 2 or 3 times more power
It literally smokes any Intel processor in the same power envelope
You should be giving praises & awards to AMD
instead the tone of article doesn't do justice to AMD
Deicidium369 - Monday, April 13, 2020 - link
Facts hurt, huh? It's impressive but not life altering. What sort of awards? "Award for not going bankrupt" or "Award for FINALLY putting something worth purchasing" or "Award because you hut AMD's fee fees"The tone is fair, Ian is a skilled writer and reviewer - I never felt he has leaned more to one side or the other.
destorofall - Tuesday, April 14, 2020 - link
can I give intel an award for "masterfully delaying a node ramp-up for almost half a decade."Korguz - Tuesday, April 14, 2020 - link
they didnt delaying, they screwed up some how, some say intel was too aggressive on what it was trying to do with it, and it didnt workWineohe - Monday, April 13, 2020 - link
This does potentially offer OEMs some breathing room with features, if the CPU and Chipset can lower their costs by a few hundred dollars. They can offer a Notebook with similar or better performance and battery life, with more features. Say a 1TB SSD versus a 512GB, 32GB vs 16GB, better display, or better dedicated GPU. This would easily sway me as a consumer toward the AMD option.Deicidium369 - Monday, April 13, 2020 - link
Nope. Most people would still buy Intel - price isn't most people's primary metric - some buy Intel because why buy something that is "like Intel" when you can, you know, "Buy Intel". OEMs build what people want - and this new CPU will be a major rarity - and will not sell in even large numbers by AMDs standards.Qasar - Monday, April 13, 2020 - link
" OEMs build what people want " or buy intel because intel bribes or threatens them, remember the athlon 64 days ? guess what, intel got taken to court over their shady dealings, and they lost, but i know you won't remember that, because your an intel fanboy, and intel cant do anything wrong.watzupken - Monday, April 13, 2020 - link
Its true that most consumers will still prefer Intel chips due to the reputation they have build for themselves over the years. However in this age where people can find information readily, that advantage may not be firm. With more enthusiasts leaning towards AMD, this may also filter down to those who are not tech savvy through positive word of mouth. For example, it is not uncommon for someone who is not tech savvy to get recommendation from a technology savvy person when buying a computer/ laptop. Moreover, AMD is very aggressive when it comes to the cost of the chips, further adding another carrot to consumers to switch camp. One other key problem was poorer battery life on AMD mobile chips, i.e. Ryzen 2xxx and 3xxx for mobile devices, which is no longer the case here unless the manufacturers deliberately gimp the battery capacity.sleeperclass - Monday, April 13, 2020 - link
No webcam is a big blow. In these times, where everyone is using online chat platforms for communicating such as Teams, Zoom ,etc, this is something that should have just been there.All said and done, good progress by AMD in the mobile cpu space.
Qasar - Monday, April 13, 2020 - link
both of the notebooks i have, have webcams, both are unplugged and i picked up a logitech C920 i think it is, just didnt like the idea of having to tilt the screen so the person i was talking to could see me better, the separate webcam, allows that no matter how the screen is tilted. but to each his own :-)