As it usually happens on these dates before CES and given that it is finally going to be canceled, it was to be expected that the leakers would get to work on sticking their tongue out at AMD and the other companies. On the desktop those of Lisa Su seem calm, more news will arrive in laptops as they can’t miss the performance train and that’s why 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.
While this is good news for the industry, the reality is what we commented long ago on AMD’s options with APUs and of course with the inclusion of V-Cache. Finally, the latter will not occur and it will be necessary to wait, but the rest of the functionalities are taken again in full and with surprises.
ADM Ryzen 9 6980HX, Ryzen 9 6900HX, Ryzen 7 6800H: lega Rembrandt
The leak reveals 3 new billed APUs that will hit the market with the Zen 3+ tagline. The curious thing about this is that this “Plus” doesn’t come because there are improvements in the architecture as such, but because instead of TSMC’s 7nm, the latest 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 at AMD, we will never see this figure with said APU due to its algorithms, but it should be 200 MHz than the previous high end, which indicates the advantages of the new node.
However, there will remain an APU of 8 cores and 16 threads, but it will have an incredible improvement: an iGPU RNA 2680M with 12 UC. This means AMD is finally abandoning the Vega architecture and entering a new dimension for casual gamers. What they will not have, as we commented above, is the expected 3D V-Cache, as they will be implementing the 16 MB of L3 common with 4 MB of L2, there is no improvement here.
His siblings share hearts and threads with him, as well as the new iGPU. They logically differ only 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 considered, which go from 35 watts for the lesser of the brothers, to 45 watts or even more with the so-called 45W +.
AMD RX 6850M XT, plus the R 680M?
This is perhaps the great cover and the one that brings the most profound changes to his credit. This is a new GPU for laptops that comes to the top of the peak performance, surpassing the current RX 6800M.
There is no mention of any changes in their CU and the number of Shaders, so we’ll assume the improvements start with the 6 mins from TSMC for your chip Navi 22 (this is also not confirmed) where they will keep the bus from 192 bits, The 12 GB of GDDR6 memory 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 which is not the official TDP as such, but which 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 large.
Regarding performance, we will also have some improvements, since it is a question of an increase in the 10 and 15% due to improvements in frequency management and some optimizations of the RDNA 2 architecture. It would not be so much in terms of fundamental changes in the design, but rather a supposed new technology for the Radeon 680M in the APU works in conjunction with the RX 6000Ms, so the performance boost might be due more to the iGPU than to the GPU improvements themselves.
All of these products will be showcased at CES 2022 on the day January 4th, that is to say this next Tuesday.
