Discovery of an "AMD Pulsar M200502" in a Dell G3 laptop leads to new Ryzen 4000 APU speculation, but it's actually an old Intel chip in disguise

Tum Apisak recently spotted an “AMD Pulsar M200502” mobile processor being tested on UserBenchmark, which managed to rack up some decent 1-core and 2-core results on the much-maligned benchmark site. The tipster noted it was a 4-core, 8-thread part that offered clocks from 2.3 GHz up to 3.9 GHz. There has been speculation it could be a new Renoir APU, with one comment suggesting an AMD Ryzen 3 4400U chip could be in the works.

It’s a reasonable presumption: There is space in the current Ryzen 4000 series for a Ryzen 3 4400U APU. The potential processor would fit well between the Ryzen 3 4300U (4 cores/4 threads; 2.7-3.7 GHz) and the Ryzen 5 4500U (6 cores/6 threads; 2.3-4.0 GHz) while offering users the advantage of Simultaneous multithreading. But once you start noticing the numerous clues on the UserBenchmark record, it’s easy to spot it’s just an Intel Core i5-8300H in disguise.

Apisak himself spotted the socket designation "U3E1" that is linked to Intel parts. But the biggest clue is the laptop used – a Dell G3 3579. The 3579 series of the Dell G3 was released in April 2018 and featured chips from Intel’s 8th Gen Coffee Lake series. The clock rates in the benchmark record point to those of the i5-8300H (4 cores/8 threads; 2.3-4.0 GHz) and the scores achieved fit in well with those recorded by other samples (although the 2-core score for the "AMD Pulsar" is particularly high).

The final nail in the coffin for this being a potentially new Ryzen 4000 APU, if the above was not sufficient already, is the presence of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti GPU. This system is clearly an aging Dell G3 with a Core i5-8300H that for some reason has been recorded as an “AMD Pulsar M200502”. For those who would like to see an AMD Ryzen 4000 processor in a current Dell gaming laptop, there is a special edition of the G5 with an APU from the 4000 H-series in the works, which was scheduled to be made available in Q2 2020.