The first ThinkPad with Ryzen 4000 has arrived: AMD much faster than Intel

The AMD Ryzen 7 4700U is a mobile processor with 8 Zen-2 cores clocked at up to 4.1 GHz. However, the CPU does not support SMT/Hyperthreading, so each core can only execute one thread. The big advantage is the much smaller 7 nm manufacturing process, which has a positive effect on the performance-per-watt ratio. Intel's Comet Lake CPUs are still manufactured in a 14 nm process; Ice Lake in 10 nm. More information about the new Ryzen processor is available in our Tech section.

We start with the single-core performance, and the Ryzen 7 4700U is pretty much on par with the Core i7 chips from Intel, so AMD managed to close the gap. The performance advantage over the old Ryzen 7 3700U is pretty impressive at 28%. When you stress all cores, the new AMD processor is much faster than the rivals. The CPU in the ThinkPad E15 can consume 30 Watts and then 28 Watts, which is sufficient for 8x 3.2-3.3 GHz. Contrary to modern Intel CPUs, where the performance often drops significantly after the first couple of benchmark runs, the results of the ThinkPad E15 are pretty stable and we can only see small fluctuations after 15 benchmark iterations. After a total of 25 CB Multi runs, the AMD model is still more than twice as fast as the E15 equipped with the Comet Lake i7 and even the Ice Lake i7 in the much more expensive Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 is clearly beaten.

The initial GPU scores are also promising. The integrated GPUs from Intel (both Comet Lake as well as Ice Lake) are clearly beaten and even the ThinkPad E15 with the dedicated AMD Radeon RX 640 GPU is slightly surpassed. The old Vega 10 iGPU is about 40 % slower. We will obviously check the actual gaming performance of AMD's new iGPU for our full review.

Our initial impressions of the new ThinkPad E15 Gen.2 with the AMD Ryzen 4000 CPU are very good. In addition to the high performance, it looks like there are no major implementation issues, either. The fans are pretty quiet so far, but we still have to check the temperatures and obviously the battery runtime. So far, we cannot see any obvious limitations, and the ThinkPad E15 Gen.2 is even equipped with the fast AX200 Wi-Fi module from Intel (Wi-Fi 6), despite the low price.

Update: The battery runtime of the AMD model is a bit shorter compared to the Intel SKU. We see a deficit of ~14% in the video test (9h vs. 10.5h) and ~8% in the Wi-Fi test (7h vs. 7.5h). We performed both tests at a brightness of 150 nits.