Iris Plus and MX250 could be in trouble: AMD Ryzen 4000 Renoir Zen 2 APUs touted have a Ryzen 9 variant, expected to sport Vega 12 and Vega 15 iGPUs

We had earlier speculated that AMD would be launching the Ryzen 4000 'Renoir' Zen 2 APUs sometime in November. While it looks like we might have to wait till CES 2020 for the new APUs, information about the Vega iGPU has been trickling down steadily. The latest info we are seeing is that a Vega 12 (and possibly Vega 15) iGPU could be on the cards. 

The information comes via famed leakster Komachi on Twitter who has identified several Renoir listings with B12 in the nomenclature indicating a 12 CU (Compute Units) iGPU. This makes sense because the 7nm process can allow for more cores to be accommodated on the die. Do note that the CPU core counts of the Renoir APUs are still elusive. 

While Vega 12 is definitely a possibility, hardware enthusiast Locuza feels that a Vega 13 or even a Vega 15 configuration is also possible. Comparing the Vega CUs and their caches, Locuza speculates that Vega 13, if it exists, could have a 3+3+3+3+1 CU configuration with each CU cluster getting 32 KB L1 instruction cache (L$) and 16 KB K$ (constant cache) or a more probable 3+3+3+2+2 config. This also implies that we might get to see a Vega 15 with a 3+3+3+3+3 configuration as well. 

The 7nm Renoir APUs present an interesting paradigm. For one, it looks like AMD will continue to use Vega and reserve Navi iGPUs for Zen 2+ instead. This is to be expected as AMD would not have had the luxury of taping out 7nm Navi in time for Zen 2 Renoir. Another interesting possibility is that Renoir APUs can further widen the performance gap with the Intel Ice Lake Iris Plus G7 and also eclipse the NVIDIA GeForce MX250, but that depends a lot on the memory implementation and the available bandwidth.