AMD rumored to be working on a Ryzen Pro mobile workstation Renoir APU with Vega 11 iGPU, more PCIe lanes and increased RAM capacity

Even though the Renoir laptop APUs are getting praises upon praises, there are some AMD fans who have been asking for more powerful dGPU options and possibly increased RAM capacity. What we are hearing from OEMs that already offer laptops with Ryzen 4000 APUs is that AMD is essentially limiting the dGPU options to keep final system costs around US$1,000. Then there is that 8x PCIe 3.0 lane limit discovered recently, which would further justify the dGPu restriction (although we do not have any hard evidence for this at the moment). To address these problems, AMD is now rumored to launch an improved laptop APU that would help team red to diversify its portfolio with a competitive mobile workstation solution.

This upcoming ‘Big Renoir” APU is supposed to have a slightly larger die and a bit higher TDP to allow for the inclusion of more compute units for the iGPU and increased number of PCIe 3.0 lanes. Industry sources close to Moore’s Law Is Dead claim that the upcoming mobile workstation APU is expected to offer a Vega iGPU with 11 CUs, plus full 16x PCIe 3.0 lanes for dGPU options above the RTX 2060, and support for up to 128 GB of LPDDR4x RAM with ECC that should be running above 4 GHz without the usual Renoir limitations. Additionally, the workstation APU would offer extended connectivity for more USB devices.

The same sources also claim that AMD is in talks with a certain laptop OEM to introduce this new workstation APU as soon as possible. This APU will be part of the Ryzen Pro series and could threaten Intel’s i9-10980HK or even more powerful Xeon mobile CPUs, allowing AMD to start digging into Intel’s mobile workstation market share.