AMD Renoir APUs Could Arrive With Zen 2 Cores and Vega 10 Graphics

AMD has deployed a bunch of patches for the AMDGPU driver to support the company's next-generation APUs (Accelerated Processing Unit), which have been baptized as Renoir.

Renoir is the supposed successor to AMD's current Picasso APUs. Picasso is built with the 12nm manufacturing process and sports Zen+ cores and Vega graphics. Renoir is rumored to make the transition to the 7nm process node and feature the latest Zen 2 microarchitecture. The general expectation was that Renoir would make use of the new Navi graphics solution. However, recent updates to AMD's open-source AMDGPU display driver have seemingly dispelled this rumor.

*Specifications in the table are unconfirmed

One line of code specifically mentions GFX9, which we already know is the ID for Vega because Navi is identified with the GFX10 ID. If you continue to examine the other lines, there is also mention of the Vega 10 silicon. However, Renoir's Vega 10 die could come with a small twist. As a quick recap, Raven Ridge and Picasso APUs employ AMD's VCN (Video Core Next) 1.0 hardware. Renoir apparently uses VCN 2.0.

An unconfirmed AMD roadmap, which was leaked by Uruguayan media Informática Cero last year, points to Renoir landing in 2020. If the launch year is accurate, Renoir will compete against Intel's 10nm Ice Lake chips that feature the Gen11 graphics solution. In Intel's own benchmarks, its quad-core Ice Lake-U (ICL-U) chip barely manages to pull out a win against the similar quad-core Ryzen 7 3700U Picasso APU. It's important to note that the Ice Lake-U processor was running with LPDDR4X-3733 memory while the Ryzen part was paired with DDR4-2400 memory. In any case, we expect Renoir to close the small gap, if not completely blow Ice Lake out of the water.