AMD has all but dominated Intel in the desktop space this year, but mobile remains a weak market for Team Red. That may be changing if rumors from Chinese forums are to be believed. AMD may be building two eight-core, 16-thread APUs to contest Intel’s Core i9-9880H.
According to users over at Mobile01, a Chinese forum, AMD will soon announce the Ryzen 7 4800H and Ryzen 9 4900H, both of which will sport eight multithreaded cores. Better still, the posts claim that the chips will be APUs, meaning they will have Vega graphics on the chip die. While there was no other information given (like clock speeds or TDPs), the poster suggested that both APUs will compete directly with the Intel Core i9-9880H, which is one of Intel’s fastest mobile CPUs.
If the rumored APUs can compete with the 9880H’s compute performance while keeping temperatures under control, they may be the dark horses AMD needs to upend the mobile computing market. Considering the onboard GPUs of AMD’s APUs far outclass the onboard graphics of Intel’s silicon (i.e., Intel UHD Graphics), AMD may have winners. However, most laptops that would have processors in this class will likely have dedicated GPUs anyway, making onboard GPUs less relevant.
Tom’s Hardware has all but confirmed the existence of the Ryzen 7 4800H. The site found listings for Asus laptops powered by the new APU on Irish retailer Elara’s website. During their search, Tom’s Hardware also found references to other new APUs, including the Ryzen 5 4600HS and Ryzen 7 4800HS. There exist no details that could be used to infer what the “HS” suffix means, but Tom’s proposes that the APUs could be more energy-efficient models.
What do you think? Are octa-core APUs just a pipe dream, or does AMD have an exciting new product in their pipeline? Let us know in the comments.