AMD Ryzen 7 7730U: AMD Barcelo refresh leaks with Zen 3 CPU cores and RX Vega iGPU design
A new leak has reinforced rumours of AMD releasing another Zen 3-based APU refresh. In October, ASUS Turkey briefly listed a Zenbook 14 powered by the Ryzen 7 7730U, which seemed like a simple refresh of the Ryzen 5000U series model. Subsequently, a leaker on Weibo has shared a Task Manager screenshot in which the final three characters of 'Ryzen 7 7730U' have been poorly obscured.
As the screenshot below shows, the Ryzen 7 7730U has 8 cores, 16 threads and the same cache volumes as its Barcelo-based predecessor. Additionally, Task Manager reports a 2 GHz base clock speed, a further link with the Ryzen 7 5825U. The APU's boost clock speed is unknown at this stage, although it is worth remembering that the Ryzen 7 5825U has a 100 MHz higher CPU clock speed than the Ryzen 7 5800U, taking it up to 4.5 GHz. Incidentally, the Ryzen 9 5980HX offers a 4.8 GHz peak boost clock, with other Ryzen 5000H APUs capable of reaching at least 4.6 GHz.
Moreover, the Ryzen 7 7730U is rumoured to carry across the Radeon RX Vega 8, a Vega architecture iGPU with 8 Compute Units. By contrast, the Ryzen 7 7740U will be a fundamentally different APU, despite the one-digit name difference. While the Ryzen 7 7730U will offer broadly the same features as the Ryzen 7 5800U, the Ryzen 7 7740U will utilise Zen 4 CPU cores, which it is expected to combine with RDNA 3-based iGPUs. Currently, AMD is expected to announce new laptop APUs in January at CES 2023.
