AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6860Z

The AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6860Z is a processor for thin and light laptops based of the Rembrandt generation. The R7 6850U integrates all eight cores based on the Zen 3+ microarchitecture. They are clocked at 2.7 (guaranteed base clock) to 4.7 GHz (Turbo) and support SMT / Hyperthreading (16 threads). The chip is manufactured on the modern 6 nm TSMC process. The Ryzen 7 PRO 6860Z is the professional version of the consumer R7 6800U with additional management features and the Microsoft Pluton Security processor. Compared to the similar Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U, the 6860Z offers a 50 MHz higher Turbo clock speed for the processor cores and the TDP is specified at 28 Watt (6850U can go down to 15 Watt).

The new Zen 3+ is a refresh of the Zen 3 architecture and should not offer a lot of changes. The chip itself however, offers a lot of new features, like support for USB 4 (40 Gbps), PCI-E Gen 4, DDR5-4800MT/s or LPDDR5-6400MT/s, WiFi 6E, Bluetooth LE 5.2, DisplayPort 2, and AV1 decode.

The processor performance is very similar to the Ryzen 7 6800U and Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U and clearly better than the old Ryzen 7 5800U thanks to the improved clock speeds. The average Intel Core i7-1280P is only slightly faster, although there can be clearly faster models thanks to the higher core count (depends on the cooling and TDP settings).

A big novelty is the integrated GPU Radeon 680M, that is now based on the RDNA2 architecture and offers 12 CUs at up to 2.2 GHz. It should be the fastest iGPU of all at the time of announcement.

The TDP of the APU is specified at 28 Watts. The power efficiency should be very good, thanks to the improved 6nm process and additional power saving features in the 6000 series.

Benchmarks