As usually happens on these dates prior to CES and considering that it is finally going to be canceled, it was to be expected that the leakers would get down to work to pull the tongue at AMD and the other companies. On the desktop those of Lisa Su seem calm, more news will arrive in laptops since they cannot miss the performance train and that is why the Rembrandt Ryzen 9 6980HX, Ryzen 9 6900HX, Ryzen 7 6800H APUs have been filtered, all with the new R 680M as well as the RX 6850M XT for gaming.
Although it is good news for the sector, the reality is what we had commented a long time ago about AMD’s options with APUs and of course with the inclusion of the V-Cache. Finally, the latter will not occur and we will have to wait, but the rest of the features are included in full and with surprises.
ADM Ryzen 9 6980HX, Ryzen 9 6900HX, Ryzen 7 6800H: Rembrandt arrives
The leaked reveals 3 new invoiced APUs that will hit the market with the tagline of being Zen 3+. The curious thing about this is that this “Plus” does not come because there are improvements in the architecture as such, but because instead of the 7 nm of TSMC the newest high-performance variant is included: its 6 nm.
The name that follows in the wake of what Intel was doing will bring a series of quite interesting and exclusive improvements, since in the case of the Ryzen 9 6980HX We are talking about the first AMD chip that officially reaches the 5 GHz in your specifications. As usually happens in AMD, we will never see this figure with said APU due to its algorithms, but it should represent 200 MHz than the previous top of the range, which indicates the benefits of the new node.
It will nevertheless remain an APU of 8 cores and 16 threads, but it will have an amazing improvement: an iGPU RDNA 2 680M with 12 CU. This means that AMD is finally leaving the Vega architecture behind and entering a new dimension for casual gamers. What they will not have as we have commented above is the expected 3D V-Cache, since they will implement the 16MB of L3 common with 4 MB of L2, there being no improvement here.
Its siblings share cores and threads with it, as well as the new iGPU. They only differ logically in frequency, because the Ryzen 9 6900HX will reach 4.9 GHz, Meanwhile he Ryzen 7 6800H will stay in 4.7 GHz. As for the TDP, they are not really clear, various figures are being considered, which range from 35 watts for the lesser of the brothers, to 45 watts or even higher with the so-called 45W +.
AMD RX 6850M XT, plus the R 680M?
It is possibly the great cover and the one that brings the most profound changes under its belt. It is a new GPU for notebooks that comes to rise to the top of the peak of performance thereby outperforming the current RX 6800M.
There is no mention of changes in their CU and number of Shaders, so we will assume that the improvements start with the 6 nm from TSMC for your chip Navi 22 (this is not confirmed either) where they will keep the bus from 192 bits, the 12GB GDDR6 united to 96 MB of Infinity Cache and there will only be changes in consumption.
Said lithographic process seems to be really interesting in this section, because as this GPU is filtered it will only consume 175 watts on PowerShift, a figure that is not the official TDP as such, but that is more real when it comes to presenting consumption. To get an idea, the RX 6800M can go up to 230 watts, so the reduction is very important.
Regarding performance, we will also have certain improvements, since there is talk of a rise in the 10 and 15% due to improvements in frequency management and some optimizations of the RDNA 2 architecture. This would not be so much from the point of view of fundamental changes in the design, but rather a supposed new technology for the Radeon 680M in the APUs to work in conjunction with the RX 6000Ms, so the performance increase could be due more to the iGPU than to the GPU enhancements themselves.
All these products will be presented at CES 2022 on day January 4th, that is to say, this coming Tuesday.
