Vega 8 iGPU from upcoming AMD Cezanne laptop APU does not impress in latest SiSoft Sandra benchmarks

AMD finally managed to take the laptop market by storm with the Ryzen 4000 ‘Renoir” APUs, and the current supply shortages affecting team read can only be reinforcing this success story, although AMD’s supply chain really needs to get its act together to keep the ball rolling for next year’s laptop APUs. From previous leaks, we already know that the upcoming Ryzen 5000 ‘Cezanne” APUs should launch come spring 2021 with the new Zen 3 cores, and we should theoretically see a significant enough performance boost over the current Zen 2 Renoir models. The problem is AMD fans have been asking for an RDNA iGPU since last year, but AMD is still reluctant to make the jump from Vega to RDNA with next year’s laptop APUs. A few new Cezanne iGPU tests were recently spotted by _rogame from Digital Leaks in the SiSoft Sandra database, and it looks like the further refined Vega 8 will only get a minor performance bump.

According to SiSoft Sandra, AMD’s Cezanne APUs sporting the Vega 8 iGPUs get a minimal core clock bump of 100 MHz, from 1750 to 1850 MHz. _rogame compares the iGPU results recorded by this early Cezanne sample with the already existing Ryzen 7 4800U APU from a Lenovo Yoga Slim 7, but this is not exactly a fair comparison because the Cezanne testing platform is limited to DDR3 RAM with 22.45 GB/s bandwidth instead of LPDDR4x-4266 with 28.83 GB/s bandwidth. Keeping this in mind, the Cezanne iGPU appears to be only 6.61% faster than the 4800U model. With faster LPDDR4x RAM, Cezanne might be able to perform a bit better, still, we are not completely sure if it can beat Intel’s Tiger Lake Xe iGPUs.

Something worth mentioning here is that the Cezanne test platform is called Celadon - CZN Renoir, which suggests that AMD is not completely overhauling the Renoir APUs. If the Cezanne iGPUs are not getting a significant upgrade, AMD should at least make sure to enable 16x PCIe 3.0 lanes between the APU and the discrete GPU solution. Right now, it seems the 8x PCIe lane restriction is keeping OEMs from adding dGPU solutions above the RTX 2060 models, so team red basically thinks that faster iGPUs are not a necessity, while faster dGPUs are too expensive for their target market.