Intel’s first wave of 10nm Ice Lake CPUs landed last year in limited quantities for low-power laptops and ultrabooks. However, at CES 2020, AMD stole Intel’s thunder by launching the 4th Gen Ryzen mobile CPUs (Renoir). Higher core counts (as much as 8) and improved IPC will allow the 7nm AMD chips to go head to head against Intel’s fastest Ice Lake chips. We have a preliminary benchmark lineup, courtesy of certain Twitter sources. Keep in mind that this isn’t a decisive indication of the CPUs’ performance, rather just a rough estimate:
First up, we have the 10th Gen Comet Lake-U based Core i7-10710U. This is a hex-core hyperthreaded CPU based on the older 14nm Skylake core. It has a markedly lower IPC than the Ice Lake part, but much higher core clocks and more threads.
Where the Comet Lake i7 has six cores and a haughty 12MB of cache memory, the Ice Lake variant has just four cores and 9MB of cache. The boost clock of the former is also considerably higher (4.7GHz vs 3.9GHz).
Surprisingly, the Core i7-1065G7 (10nm) falls short of its Comet Lake sibling. This means that this test favors multi-core performance, rather than sheer IPC grunt. The graphics score of the former is understandably much higher, courtesy of the 64EU, Gen11 graphics.
Moving onto the actual test, the Ryzen 7 4800U is similar to the 10710U in terms of the raw specs, but the higher IPC of the Zen 2 design paired with the efficiency of the 7nm node helps it trump both the 10th Gen Intel chips.
It’s important to note that the 4800U has a lower boost clock than the Comet Lake i7, but it still manages to best it. Furthermore, it seems that AMD’s 7nm optimizations to the Vega 11 iGPU are quite effective. Despite the Intel Gen11 GPU packing as many as 64EUs, the Radeon GPU comes out on top, albeit by a slim margin. I expect these GPUs to go neck to neck in the coming months.
AMD’s Ryzen 4000 powered laptops are slated to hit retail in March next month. The company has promised as many as 1000 devices based on the Renoir APUs in 2020.
