It appears that AMD is looking at its competition again for naming inspiration. Hardware sleuth APISAK has spotted a listing for an 8C/16T “Ryzen 7 Extreme Edition,” which hearkens back to Intel’s special Pentium 4 processor lineup from 2003/2004, as well as the company’s more recent Core-X series. Judging by the lower base core clock (1.8 GHz), this is almost certainly a Renoir-series chip.
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— APISAK (@TUM_APISAK) May 11, 2020
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AMD Ryzen 7 Extreme Edition
(Renoir) pic.twitter.com/WW8uEH4SOV
APISAK also discovered another entry for a “Ryzen 9 4900U with Radeon Graphics.” Interestingly enough, its specifications seem to mirror those of the Ryzen 7 Extreme Edition, which implies that both are merely slight variations of AMD’s Ryzen 7 4800U.
AMD Ryzen 9 4900U
— APISAK (@TUM_APISAK) May 11, 2020
AMD Majolica-RN pic.twitter.com/HaUn8PG5Cc
But considering the slightly faster boost clocks on both (4.3 GHz vs. 4.2 GHz), the Ryzen 7 Extreme Edition and Ryzen 9 4900U probably carry higher TDPs, as VideoCardz points out. Others suggest that these chips could actually belong to Microsoft’s lineup of Surface devices.
“There’s a strong possibility that one, or maybe both, of the mysterious APUs were designed exclusively for Microsoft,” wrote Tom’s Hardware. “AMD has produced custom-made APUs for Microsoft’s Surface devices in the past. The personalized APUs were nearly identical to the original SKUs, but Microsoft’s variant had one additional Vega Compute Unit (CU). Ryzen 3000 U-series (codename Picasso) chips originally maxed out at 10 CUs, and Microsoft’s tailored-made APUs bumped the count up to 11.”
“However, AMD labeled Microsoft’s APUs as ‘Surface Edition,’ not Extreme. By removing the Surface moniker from the APUs, AMD could potentially offer them to other customers as well.”
