AMD Ryzen 7 7730U shows up on PassMark as a disappointing Ryzen 7 5825U doppelganger

It’s not often AMD makes a misstep, but it is unlikely there will be too much love for Barcelo-R APUs such as the Ryzen 7 7730U. Consumers taking a quick glance at the name may simply see "Ryzen 7000", which indicates this is a member of AMD’s latest processor family. However, Team Red’s new naming scheme actually reveals that this is a Zen 3 chip, as the third digit in the second part of the name is “3”. The Ryzen 7 7730U is not a cutting-edge part with Zen 4 knowhow and an RDNA 3-based iGPU; it is a Zen 3 APU with an old Radeon RX Vega 8 graphics processor.  

What this means is that the Ryzen 7 7730U, while looking like a brand-new processor that might promise generous generational performance gains, is in reality actually a bit of a disappointing Ryzen 7 5825U doppelganger. The Barcelo-R APU scores 3,186 in the single-thread test on PassMark, which is a measly +4.2% ahead of the older chip (launched January 2022), and it produces 19,034 in the CPU Mark test suite that is only +3.36% ahead of the result managed by the AMD Ryzen 7 5825U. Both chips have the same specifications and clock speeds, with the Ryzen 7 7730U having a reported 15 W TDP while the Ryzen 7 5825U was specified with 10-25 W (15 W default).

Perhaps the almost identical CPU performance could be overlooked if the AMD Ryzen 7 7730U at least came with an updated iGPU component. However, it is lumbered with the aging Vega 8 solution while something like the Zen 3+-based Ryzen 7 6800U, which has a reported TDP of 15-28 W, was treated to the Radeon 680M iGPU that features RDNA 2 architecture. It will pay for those shoppers seeking a new thin and light laptop to have a good look at the chip inside the device, because the presence of a Ryzen 7000 processor doesn’t mean it is necessarily a better choice than an older Ryzen 6000 SKU.

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