Renoir laptops: Beating Intel at a third of the price, half the weight, and a fraction of the power

AMD's H-series Zen 2 mobile processors have been performing quite handsomely in our testing, propelling themselves high enough above Intel's current offerings to the point where team blue has tried to discount the value of benchmarks. However, we find benchmarks to be very important for making objective comparisons between laptops and other devices. Since Intel has yet to detail a proper alternative to them, let's take a look at some benchmarks and see if we can find what has Intel concerned.

Of course, single-core performance is still worth mentioning. Intel still holds the crown when it comes to single-core performance, although the importance of that has been greatly diminished in recent times as utilizing multiple cores has become more common. Unfortunately for team blue, the minuscule difference the chips have in single-core performance likely won't be enough to set Intel ahead in any practical workloads. Plus, we only see better single-core performance out of some of the highest-end, most expensive Intel hardware in our data.

Regarding pricing, a reasonable configuration of the RP-15 will set you back around $1,200. On the Intel side, the Sky X4C we tested could set you back more than triple that price at $3,800. Even the Dell Alienware m17 R2 costs much more, with our tested model priced at $3,900 while performing 13% worse than the RP-15. What does triple your money get you from these Intel laptops? Let's take a look at the graphics benchmark performance of these laptops.

From these scores, it's fairly clear that the faster GPUs being used in these laptops help rather significantly in 3DMark. Considering that these are gaming laptops, this was a fairly obvious outcome and isn't exactly indicative of the CPU's performance. At the time of writing, we have yet to see any Renoir-powered laptops equipped with anything better than an Nvidia RTX 2060 Mobile. While this is disappointing, it's understandable that OEMs wouldn't want to jump head-first into developing laptops with these brand-new chips. It would be far from surprising to see Ryzen laptops become much more powerful in this regard in the coming months, or even later next year.

Conveniently, both AMD and Intel use the same naming scheme when it comes to their ULV processors. U-series processors are built with efficiency at the forefront and are designed to squeeze the most performance they can out of as little power as possible.   

In the data shown below, we can see that our Renoir U-series laptops tested roughly the same in both Cinebench R20 and R15 single-core testing, only varying by a handful of points between each other.

Multi-core is where things get interesting. Despite our rather small sample size, our data does a good job of showing how much of a difference cooler designs can make. For instance, the same chip found in the HP Envy x360 13 can be found in the Lenovo Flex 5 performing 15% better in a Cinebench R20 run. The difference in size and footprint could be a factor, but it's also worth considering that the HP ProBook 445 G7 only beats the 13-inch Envy by 5% in our tests.

Regardless of the thermal situation, the scores we can see out of these laptops are quite impressive. The upper end of our scores (see below) could easily be mistaken for 45 watt Intel processors if we simply omitted the specs. Below, several laptops featuring Intel's H-series processors have been added to demonstrate this.

The worst result from Intel in this dataset is from the MSI Modern 14. The 6-core, 12-thread processor in the MSI is beaten by the 4-core, 4-thread processor in the Acer Swift 3 by a whole 21%. Considering that around 20% qualifies as a "generational" improvement by some standards, getting beaten by that much goes to show the massive improvements in these latest AMD Ryzen CPUs. That's not even mentioning the fact that the Intel CPU has three times more threads to work with compared to the AMD CPU. 

These efficient APUs nearly match the scores of Intel's 45 watt chips despite having half the threads in some cases. We'll likely see even larger margins in performance when SMT-enabled Renoir laptops begin to roll out, most notably with Ryzen 5 4600U and Ryzen 7 4800U APUs.

Ice Lake is pretty much crushed by Renoir in our testing. However, much of that could be attributed to the increased core count on most of our test devices. These Renoir laptops don't have SMT enabled, however, leaving them ultimately with fewer threads. This could explain why the 4-core, 4-thread Ryzen 3 4300U is beaten by Ice Lake with a substantial margin. Regardless, many of these Renoir laptops can be found at prices matching or lower than these Ice Lake laptops. If speed is all you're going for, Ice Lake might not be the best choice at this point.

Of course, the graphical prowess of AMD's integrated Vega graphics can't be ignored. Since even the lowest end integrated GPU from these Renoir APUs would beat, say, Intel UHD Graphics 630, we'll be spending our time comparing Iris Plus Graphics and Vega graphics.

Vega and Iris Plus Graphics are fairly close in performance. The Vega 5 graphics featured on the Ryzen 3 4300U beat our best Iris Plus G4 score by 13%. Vega 6, featured in the Ryzen 5 4500U, just about matches Iris Plus G7 in Time Spy. Overall, the Ryzen 7 4700U tops the charts, beating one of our best Ice Lake Time Spy scores by 15%.

However, things are a bit more scattered when looking at Fire Strike scores. Interestingly, while the Ryzen 7 4700U's Vega 7 graphics beat one of our best Iris Plus G7 scores by 15%, Vega 7 only just matches Iris Plus G7 in Fire Strike. It's important to note that Fire Strike is a much older benchmark than Time Spy, so it's realistic to assume that software support for Vega graphics is much better in Time Spy. Fire Strike is over seven years old at this point, so it would make plenty of sense if this was the case.

Overall, at least in modern titles that can properly take advantage of AMD's Vega integrated graphics, you can expect performance matching or beating Intel's Ice Lake graphics solution. It's worth noting that with Tiger Lake and its substantial performance gains on the horizon, AMD could be dethroned in this regard. This kind of competition is always nice to see, and we're expecting AMD and Intel to continue this battle for the best integrated graphics solution going forward. 

One of the key perks of high-end integrated graphics is the decreased relevance of low-end dedicated graphics cards, such as the Nvidia GeForce MX350.

Currently, we anticipate Tiger Lake to bring significant gains in performance. Some preliminary information we've seen suggests that performance could be anywhere around 40% better than Vega 8, which would put Tiger Lake well ahead of our GeForce MX250 data, and only around 15% worse than an MX350. Those numbers are almost clean enough to have slid off some Intel marketing material, but that's just how things worked out here.

Of course, with any comparison of Nvidia GPUs, it's worth noting that the TDP for these Nvidia cards can vary between 10 and 25 watts. The difference between devices could be anywhere up to 150% more power being used, so performance will vary rather dramatically depending on where the TDP was configured on any given laptop. Regardless, that doesn't interfere with the point being made here, plus the consistent performance in our MX250 data suggests they're all operating at the same TDP.

Renoir has certainly shaken things up in the laptop space. The sheer amount of raw performance available in mid-range devices is quite significant, especially considering that CPU performance only previously considered possible in bulky gaming laptops is plenty accessible in slimmer, lighter, and overall smaller form-factor devices.

With Intel's Tiger Lake on the horizon, it will be interesting to see how AMD responds to Intel's latest mobile chips. Considering that Tiger Lake is supposed to bring GPU performance in excess of an Nvidia GeForce MX250 (as noted earlier), choosing between AMD and Intel might not be as obvious of a decision. We're looking forward to even more advancements in performance in the laptop space in the near future, regardless of who delivers it.