Alleged AMD Ryzen Renoir Desktop APU Surfaces With 8 Cores

[harlan4096]

Picasso could be on its way out.

A mysterious and nameless octa-core AMD Ryzen CPU has been spotted on UserBenchmark. Hardware detective @TUM_APISAK snooped it out, and there's speculation that the chip could be a desktop version of AMD's Renoir APU chips.

UserBenchmark isn't the most reliable place to look for unreleased hardware. There have been a few fake submissions lately, proving that UserBenchmark can be easily spoofed by changing some strings in your registry. So it'd be wise to approach this submission with caution.

The AMD Ryzen 3 3200G and Ryzen 5 3400G (codename Picasso) are the only two members in AMD's current family of desktop APUs. The pair are still rocking the Zen+ CPU and Vega GPU microarchitectures, and GlobalFoundries produces these chips for AMD on its 12nm process node. That means these are the only products that haven't transitioned over to Zen 2 and TSMC's 7nm FinFET manufacturing process.

Specs

Model Cores / Thread Base / Boost Clock (GHz) L3 Cache (MB) Graphics Compute Units Graphics Frequency (MHz) TDP (W)

AMD 100-000000149-40_40/30_Y*
8 / 16 3.0 / 3.95 16 ? ? ? ?
Ryzen 5 3400G
4 / 8 3.7 / 4.2 4 Radeon RX Vega 11 11 1,400 65
Ryzen 3 3200G
4 / 4 3.6 / 4.0 4 Radeon Vega 8 8 1,250 65*Specifications are unconfirmed.

The alleged Renoir desktop engineering sample surfaced with the 100-000000149-40_40/30_Y codename. UserBenchmark exposed the chip with an eight-core, 16-thread configuration. The existing Ryzen 5 3400G checks in at four cores and eight threads. If this submission is legit, Renoir could usher in double the cores for AMD's APU. 

That doesn't sound absurd when you look at what Zen 2 did for the chipmaker's Ryzen 3000 desktop CPUs. The prior generation was limited to an eight-core configuration; with Zen 2, AMD was able to stick up to 16 cores on the Ryzen 9 3950X.

When it comes to clock speeds, UserBenchmark identified the Renoir sample with a 3 GHz base clock and 3.95 GHz boost clock. We wouldn't count on those figures though, since this is an engineering sample and the final specifications are likely to vary. 

 

The software didn't reveal the amount of L3 cache; however, the latency ladder might hold some clues. The results shared for the chip look very similar to that of the Ryzen 9 4900H, so we suspect that the mysterious Renoir chip has 8MB of L3 cache as well. On the other hand, we're dealing with unreleased hardware here, and UserBenchmark may be misreporting the cache.

 

The APU seemingly scored 86.2% on UserBenchmark, putting it in the same ballpark as the Ryzen 9 4900H. The average score, which is based on 102 user submissions, for the Ryzen 9 4900H is 89%. Again, take the numbers with a pinch of salt. UserBenchmark doesn't have the best reputation when it comes to ranking processors. Additionally, existing AMD APUs operate within the 65W envelope. There's no reason not to retain the same limit on Renoir. The Ryzen 9 4900H is a 45W mobile part, so on paper, a desktop Renoir should perform faster.

There is no doubt that Zen 2 will bring interesting things to AMD's APU lineup. For now, we can only hope that AMD releases desktop Renoir sooner rather than later.
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