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AMD's Ryzen 5000 APU lineup is a confusing mix of Zen 2 Lucienne and Zen 3 Cezanne parts

AMD Ryzen 5000 APUs will have both Zen 2 Lucienne and Zen 3 Cezanne parts. (Image Source: AMD)
AMD Ryzen 5000 APUs will have both Zen 2 Lucienne and Zen 3 Cezanne parts. (Image Source: AMD)
AMD's upcoming Ryzen 5000 APU lineup will be a mix of Zen 2 Lucienne (Renoir Refresh) and Zen 3 Cezanne parts probably with the intention of offering more value to OEMs and maximizing the utilization of the 7 nm node. So far, there is no direct way to demarcate both the architectures in the lineup save for the fact that the odd-numbered parts are Lucienne while the even-numbered ones are Cezanne.

Information about AMD's upcoming lineup of mobile processors, Cezanne and Lucienne (Renoir Refresh), have now leaked online. Both Cezanne and Lucienne belong to the Ryzen 5000 family. Lucienne was originally thought to an exclusive APU for Google Chromebooks. However, recent leaks indicate that Lucienne will be available for other laptops as well and will be part of the Ryzen 5000 APU family alongside Cezanne.

@ExecuFix has leaked full details of the Ryzen 5000 APU lineup and this once again confirms that Ryzen 5000 will be a mix of Cezanne and Lucienne. The information posted by @ExecuFix is detailed in the table below. All Cezanne and Lucienne APUs will have a cTDP between 10 and 25 W.

Data from @ExecuFix on Twitter
SKU Architecture Cores / Threads Base / Boost Clock (GHz) L3 Cache (MB) GPU Cores GPU Clock (GHz)
Ryzen 3 5300U Zen 2 (Lucienne) 4 / 8 2.6 / 3.85 4 6 1.5
Ryzen 3 5400U Zen 3 (Cezanne) 4 / 8 2.6 / 4.0 8 6 1.6
Ryzen 5 5500U Zen 2 (Lucienne) 6 / 12 2.1 / 4.0 8 7 1.8
Ryzen 5 5600U Zen 3 (Cezanne) 6 / 12 2.3 / 4.2 12 7 1.8
Ryzen 7 5700U Zen 2 (Lucienne) 8 / 16 1.8 / 4.3 8 8 1.9
Ryzen 7 5800U Zen 3 (Cezanne) 8 / 16 2.0 / 4.4 16 8 2.0

From the table, it is seen that the odd-numbered SKUs are Lucienne while the even number ones are Cezanne. The top-end Ryzen 7 5800U is a Zen 3 Cezanne part with eight cores and 16 threads running at 2 GHz base and a 4.4 GHz boost. The Ryzen 7 5800U features an 8-CU (512 SP) Vega 8 iGPU clocked at 2 GHz. Similar to the recently announced Ryzen 5000 desktop parts, significant IPC improvements and reduced latency can be expected with the Cezanne SKUs owing to the new shared L3 cache and about 200 MHz faster clocks.

The Lucienne SKUs are essentially Renoir Refreshes but now offer simultaneous multithreading (SMT) along with faster GPU cores. The Radeon iGPU in both Cezanne and Lucienne SKUs is still GCN-based. 

Like the Ryzen 5000 desktop variants, Cezanne can be expected to be comparatively more expensive than Renoir. It probably makes sense to have a Renoir Refresh with SMT enabled and higher clocks to offer a cost advantage to OEMs while also making full use of the 7 nm node.

That being said, there is some potential for confusion for those looking to buy laptops powered by Ryzen 5000, and it is not yet clear how AMD and/or OEMs plan to educate end-customers about the presence of two different architectures in the same series.

AMD is expected to announce the Ryzen 5000 APU lineup during a virtual CES 2021 event in January.

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> Expert Reviews and News on Laptops, Smartphones and Tech Innovations > News > News Archive > Newsarchive 2020 10 > AMD's Ryzen 5000 APU lineup is a confusing mix of Zen 2 Lucienne and Zen 3 Cezanne parts
Vaidyanathan Subramaniam, 2020-10-20 (Update: 2020-10-20)