Written by Metal Messiah

It appears that in a recent leak coming from Biostar (via Komachi_Ensaka), several “Renoir” Ryzen 4000 APU SKUs  have been spotted. BIOSTAR has listed these AM4 “Renoir” APUs under the CPU support list page of their recently announced B550 Motherboards.

Several AMD Ryzen 4000 “Renoir” APUs have been spotted along with their model names, OPN codes and final clock speeds. The motherboard page of “Biostar” features full support for the Ryzen 4000G and GE processors, which are having a max TDP value of 65 Watts and 35 Watts respectively.

These are APUs, and unlike normal desktop CPUs, these have integrated onboard Graphics (not comparing here with Intel’s iGPU though). Simply put, an APU is constituted of both the CPU and GPU cores on a single “die”. They often serve as an approachable “entry-level” graphics solutions for budget gaming PCs and gaming laptops alike.

Those gamers who don’t want a dedicated/discrete GPU can go for an APU setup for “casual” light Gaming.

The recently released B550 Motherboards will also have support for these “Renoir” APUs. The “Renoir”‘ APU lineup will succeed the Ryzen “Picasso” lineup from last year. It will have support for the AM4 socket.

These new APUs will feature the same die as the Ryzen 4000 ‘Renoir’ “Mobility” CPU lineup. The Ryzen 4000 ‘Renoir’ AM4 family is aimed for the “desktop” platform. These new processors feature  “7nm Zen 2” cores and an enhanced “7nm Vega GPU” core, offering a slight upgrade in the form of a full 7nm architecture design.  The leaked list from Biostar features G, GE and PRO series of SKUs. Biostar has listed 7 Ryzen 4000 ‘Renoir’ APUs on its support page, including the PRO series and Low-Power series variants.

The Ryzen 7 PRO 4700G, Ryzen 5 PRO 4400G, Ryzen 3 PRO 4200G all make up the “PRO series” and these are “65 Watts” TDP SKUs.  On the other hand the low-power ’35W’ segment consists of the Ryzen 7 4700GE, Ryzen 5 4400GE, & the Ryzen 3 4200GE respectively. The “clock speed” specifications are also being mentioned.

These Ryzen 4000 APUs are going to feature 4, 6, as well as 8 core parts, like the “Ryzen 7 4700G”. To really take advantage of the enhanced “Vega iGPU”, you would have to use a high frequency DRAM module to feed the GPU with as much bandwidth as possible. All Ryzen 4000 ‘Renoir’ APUs will support native DDR4-3200 MHz speeds though.

Videocardz recently posted a picture of the Ryzen 7 4700G APU.  With the release of these high-performance “Renoir” APUs, AMD plans to enter a different “market” segment.  Previously only 4-core/8-thread APUs were available with up to 11 Compute Units/CUs, but this new “Renoir” silicon only features 8 Compute Units.

Previous generation APUs came with 11 CUs, but AMD has made it very clear that “despite” fewer CUs on this “Renoir” lineup, the Graphics performance is still better, thanks to the optimized GPU clock speeds.  Like mentioned before, APUs are a perfect upgrade path for “budget” and “casual” gamers alike, and for those who don’t want to spend some extra cash on a dedicated GPU, or they are “budget” constrained for some reason.  Given these new chips are rumored to feature  8-core/16-thread parts, along with a 6-core/12-thread option as well, this might give few more options for system builders to upgrade.

Until now AMD has only released  “budget” APUs, with the assumption that serious gamers and professionals will mostly go for a “discrete” graphics cards in their systems, which seems to be a reasonable assumption if you ask me. But with this new “Renoir” APU lineup things are a bit different.

An APU can also be seen as a “backup” option, just in case your GPU dies. Or, these could alternatively be used in NAS boxes, servers, media centers etc. Rumor has it that these new APUs will use the same Vega architecture as the “Ryzen 4000 Mobile” chips. This seems like a slight bummer since “NAVI APU” would have been an interesting option, in my opinion.

The GE SKU APUs on the other hand might be an ideal option for compact gaming PCs which require high core counts along with low levels of power consumption/heat, at 35 Watts TDP. AMD can also target “pre-built” and OEM PCs, with the Vega integrated Graphics.

Here you can see some gaming benchmarks of the previous gen Ryzen 5 3400G and Ryzen 5 2400G APUs tested on 720p and 900p respectively. This gives us an idea about the level of performance casual gamers can expect.