Alleged Next-Gen AMD Renoir Zen 2 APU Spied With A Big Boost In GPU Clocks
It is only a matter of time before AMD refreshes its APU (accelerated processing unit) lineup. Codenamed "Renoir," the next-generation APUs will combine CPU cores based on AMD's Zen 2 architecture with GPU cores that are likely to still be based on Vega, rather than making a move to Navi. That's a bit disappointing, though if a recent leak is any indication, we could be looking at a significant boost in GPU clockspeed for the next round of APUs.
Note that AMD does not actually use the term "APU" anymore—it prefers the longer-winded descriptor of "Ryzen Processors with Radeon Vega Graphics" when describing chips like the Ryzen 3 3200G and its other current-generation APUs.
Call them whatever you like, the point is, these sort of all-in-one slices of silicon house both the CPU and GPU. As it pertains to Renoir, Twitter user APISAK posted a screenshot of what looks to be a SiSoft SANDRA database entry, which points to an unannounced Renoir chip. Have a look...
Source: APISAK (via Twitter)
There are a couple of things that stand out in the screenshot above. Assuming the listed specs are real (and of course we don't know if they are), this particular Renoir part sports 8 compute units and 512 stream processors.
The same is true of AMD's current-generation Ryzen 3 3200G, so we're probably looking at a Ryzen 3 4200G with Vega 8 graphics on board. We can't see any details about the CPU portion, but if this is indeed a Ryzen 3 4200G chip, it will probably retain the same 4-core/4-thread arrangement as the Ryzen 3 3200G.
What's more interesting, however, is the GPU clock. It's shown at 1.75GHz. That's a generous 500MHz bump over the graphics clock in the Ryzen 3 3200G (1.25GHz). So even though it does not look like Navi will be featured in the next round of GPUs, if AMD is able to aggressively push higher clockspeeds, Renoir could still offer a decent performance boost for graphics chores.
This is all speculation, and because this is a leak, we have to take the specs with a grain of salt. That said, the developers of the popular AIDA64 utility recently added benchmarks for "AMD Zen 2 Renoir," along with "preliminary support for 4th generation AMD Ryzen desktop CPUs." So, it's very likely both Zen 3 and Renoir are out in the wild, as engineering samples (both are slated to ship in 2020).
