AMD 4000 series looking to take over the Mobile space.

The recent launch of AMD's mobile offering the 4000 series which are AMD's first 7nm x86 mobile processors shows that AMD is looking at expanding its growth even further by endeavouring to gain a strong foothold in the mobile computing space mainly being comprised of laptops.

For more than 8 years AMD had failed to knock Intel off its perch but since 2017 after the launch of the Zen architecture by AMD all that changed with AMD aggressively pumping out high core and high thread count CPU's that not only closed the gap in gaming performance but even surpassed team blue's(Intel) offerings when it came to workflows outside of gaming.

Earlier this year Lisa Su unveiled the 4000 series of chips to the public at CES 2020 and she promised back than that it had been the breakthrough that mobile computing scene had needed by introducing not only higher performance but also much-needed competition in the mobile CPU space.

The series 4000 chips offer various configurations that can be paired with various hardware but for now, the lastest hardware combination comes by way of the Asus Zephyrus G14 with a Ryzen 9 4900HS in combination with an RTX 2060 Max-Q. This configuration was taken through its paces by early reviews which looked at not only gaming performance but also creative workload performance as well.

It should come as no surprise that the 4900HS in the Asus Zephyrus G14 did very well when it came to multithreaded workloads and performed very well in single-core performance as well. According to PCWorld the new Asus Zephyrus G14 with a Ryzen 9 4900HS was tested by having it run Cinebench R15 which is a CPU and thread dependant application meaning that the more threads and cores available to it the better it will run. The G14 was put up against the Acer Predator Helios 700, i9-9880H in the MSI GE65 Raider, The old-school Ryzen 7 2700—a desktop chip and the beastly Alienware Area 51m R1 with a desktop Core i9-9900K. The 4900HS came in second to the Alienware Area 51m R1 in Cinebench R15 and third in Cinebench R20 in multithreaded workloads. It came fourth in Single-threaded performance in Cinebench R15 while managing the first place in Cinebench R20 Single-threaded performance. It is important to note however that Cinebench R15 is older than Cinebench R20 which opens up more threads explaining the discrepancies. In handbrake, however, the 4900HS did manage to encode a 30GB 1080P the third fastest. The data paints a very clear picture that the 4900HS is a hell of an offering from AMD considering that the two offerings namely the Helios 700 and the Alienware Area 51m R1 where the only ones to beat it even though they are not even in the same weight categories and thus the 4900HS had less breathing room when it came to thermals and thus performance but it still managed to put up a good fight and stood its own ground against them even beating out an old-school Ryzen 7 2700—a desktop chip.

If that performance is anything to go by the 4000 series chips should provide great performance for the money for just about any workload. The 4000H series will focus more on high performance and should probably feature in Gaming focused products while the 4000U series will feature in ultra-thin laptops that should still be plenty capable.

Another notable improvement is SmartShift which recognizes when a workload is GPU or CPU intensive and instantaneously shifts power to boost the clock speed. SmartShift happens so fast that it saves power when shifting workloads. The result AMD says is 10% higher framerates when gaming and 12% faster content creation.

As for the price, it seems that the 4000 series of chips are aiming to be cheaper than the competition which should follow the trend of "best bang for your buck " AMD is known for. As an example, the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 with Ryzen 9 4900HS and RTX 2060 Max-Q is priced between $1299.99 to $1999.99 while the intel offering in the form of the ASUS ROG GX502GV Core i7 i7-9750H starts at £2,380.84 which is an offering within the 4900HS class. As for battery life according to the reviewers, the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 with Ryzen 9 4900HS offered 10 hours while for others that came down to 6 hours. Overall the next few years promises to be amazing in the mobile processor space if AMD has anything to say about it.