AMD's 7 nm Renoir APUs allegedly pop up on 3DMark11

The Renoir APUs are the 7 nm Zen 2 successors of the currently available Picasso models derived from the Zen+ 12 nm architecture first featured last year in the Ryzen 2000-series. We are expecting more than 4 cores and higher DDR4 clocks, possible some improvements to the iGPUs. Even though the Renoir series is scheduled to be released in the first half of 2020, some test samples have already been spotted in the 3DMark11 tests, and it looks like we could be in for a few surprises on the spec side.

The Reddit post that includes the details mentions the results were submitted privately so no one can really verify the validity of such claims on the 3DMark site. Apparently, the alleged Renoir APUs are running on a platform codenamed Celadon-RN, and there are three distinct setups with different specs, but it is still unclear if these pertain to a single model or three different models.

Unfortunately, the results do not mention anything about core counts. Instead we are presented with default frequencies for the CPU and iGPUs. The first setup has the CPU running at 1.7 GHz, while the GPU is clocked at 1.5 GHz. The second one has a CPU clocked at 1.8 GHz with no iGPU clocks, and the last one has a 2 GHz CPU coupled with a 1.1 GHz iGPU.

These results suggest that the iGPUs are indeed upgraded, and we could see the inclusion of Vega 10 chips or even Navi variants that are clocked at 1.5 GHz. The low base clocks could signal the inclusion of six-core+ setups, then again these are most likely early test samples that still require tweaking. All three setups are running DDR4-2666 RAM modules, even though a recent Linux driver patch claimed Renoir can support up to LPDDR4-4266.

AMD’s Renoir platform should be competing with Intel’s upcoming Tiger Lake chips, but in order for this to happen, AMD really needs to add more cores and faster RAM, since Intel plans to include LPDDR5 support. At least AMD seems to be aware of the need for faster iGPUs.