AMD's 4700S May Be CPU That Gave Life to the Xbox Series X

[harlan4096]

Ryzen or no Ryzen?

Twitter user InstLatX64 has discovered a mysterious AMD 4700S processor that's evidently part of an AMD 4700S Desktop Kit. It's plausible that the developer kit is the same one that Microsoft was utilizing to develop one of its Xbox consoles.

Although not officially a member of the Ryzen family, we suspect that the AMD 4700S probably takes after the Ryzen 4000 (Renoir) mobile APUs. If that's the case, the AMD 4700S should be employing AMD's Zen 2 cores, meaning this could be an engineering sample of the processor that powers the Xbox Series X or Series S.

The Xbox Series X and Series S utilize a custom octa-core AMD Zen 2 processor. Other than the clock speeds, no official name was given to the chip. The one inside the Series X features a 3.8 GHz clock speed and 3.6 GHz clock with SMT, while the variant for the Series S is clocked at 3.6 GHz with a 3.4 GHz SMT clock.

A Geekbench 5 submission (via Leakbench), which dates back to March 29, shows the AMD 4700S with an eight-core, 16-thread configuration and 8MB of L3 cache. The obscure processor's specifications coincide with mobile Renoir for sure. The AMD 4700S seemingly sports a 3.6 GHz base clock and 4 GHz boost clock. The desktop kit reportedly comes equipped with 16GB of memory as well.

The AMD 4700S scored 998 points and 8,589 points in the single-and multi-core benchmarks, respectively. For comparison, the Ryzen 9 4900HS, which is the Ryzen 4000 flagship, averaged 1,083 points in the single-core test and 6,994 points in the multi-core test. While the Ryzen 9 4900HS delivered up to 8.5% higher single-core performance, the AMD 4700S offered up to 22.8% higher multi-core performance.

What's even stranger is that AMD recently released the firmware and corresponding drivers for the AMD 4700S Desktop Kit. There are drivers for the chipset, onboard audio and the Ethernet port. Digging a bit into the firmware, we found mentions of Cardinal, which could be the internal codename that AMD is using for this particular desktop kit. The files are dated yesterday (April 19), so they are very fresh.

Developer kits aren't typically available to the general public. However, Finnish retailer Tulostintavaratalo has listed the AMD 4700S 8-Core Desktop Kit on its online store for €263.71 (~$317.38) with a delivery time spanning from 14 to 30 working days. While the AMD 4700S remains a mystery, it does appear that AMD is selling it in the retail channels.
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