Opinion | 8-core AMD Ryzen 7 4800U promises huge gains over the Intel 10th gen Core i7-1065G7, but we'll believe it when we see it

AMD just announced its latest batch of 3rd generation mobile Ryzen processors to directly tackle the Intel 10th gen Core U-series and 9th gen Coffee Lake-H series. The new 7 nm family consists of several SKUs ranging from the quad-core Ryzen 3 4300U up to the octa-core Ryzen 7 4800U and the 45 W Ryzen 7 4800H that will debut on an upcoming Dell gaming laptop. AMD's own in-house benchmarks are claiming that the Ryzen 7 4800U will outperform Intel's Core i7-1065G7 by 90 percent and 28 percent on the CineBench R20 Multi-Thread and 3DMark Time Spy benchmarks, respectively.

While we have no doubt that the Ryzen 7 4800U will be awesome, we have to take any manufacturer-provided benchmark comparisons with a grain of salt. For one, OEMs have a tendency to push certain benchmark results over others. Secondly, the performance range for a single processor can be very wide between different laptops meaning that the aforementioned 90 percent claim over Intel may be comparing the Ryzen 7 4800U at its best to the Core i7-1065G7 at its worst. In other words, these preliminary numbers may not represent the laptops that consumers will see on store shelves.

As an example, our CineBench comparison chart below shows both our fastest and slowest Ryzen 7 3700U laptops (Dell Inspiron 15 5585, HP Envy x360 13) and our fastest and slowest Core i7-1065G7 laptops (Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 15, Razer Blade Stealth GTX Max-Q). The raw multi-thread performance difference between the Ryzen-powered Dell and HP is roughly 50 percent while the performance different between the Intel-powered Microsoft and Razer laptops is about 47 percent. Thus, depending on which laptops are chosen, the performance delta between the Ryzen 7 3700U and Core i7-1065G7 can be exaggerated or minimized.

AMD didn't explicitly tell us what laptops they used for their preliminary Ryzen 7 4800U vs. Core i7-1065G7 benchmark results mentioned above which has us believe that a developer Ryzen 7 4800U unit was involved. Such in-house systems would represent the processor at its best and not necessarily the performance of an average retail laptop that consumers will see in stores. So the next time you see comparison charts made by AMD, Intel, Nvidia or some other manufacturer, keep in mind that those percentages can vary greatly between different laptop vendors.