FEBRUARY 2020 PCWorld 15The Achilles heel of
the Core i7-10710U is
its pedestrian UHD
graphics, which offers
half the performance of
the Ice Lake Core
i7-1065G7. Intel’s
current offerings
basically force
consumers to choose
between the superior
graphics of the Core
i7-1065G7 or the superior multi-core
performance of the Core i7-10710U.
With the Ryzen 7 4800U, AMD said,
consumers can have their cake and eat it too
by getting better graphics performance and
better multi-core performance.
RUH ROH: BATTERY LIFE
IS TBD
All out performance isn’t the only factor in
laptops though—battery life matters too.
Unfortunately, AMD didn’t disclose hard
details on just how well Ryzen 4000 chips
compare to Intel’s designs. That’s a particular
sore point, as the Ryzen 3000-series hasn’t
adjudicated itself here (go.pcworld.com/
msl3). Although we have seen some early
Ryzen 4000 battery life specs from laptop
vendors that don’t look particularly good,
we’ve also seen some that look reasonable.
For its part, AMD said we’re in the early
stages of new laptops based on Ryzen
4000 chips and a lot more tuning has to be
done before judgment should be passed.
So take any vendor numbers with a grain of
salt as they’re likely to change, company
officials said.
The new Ryzen chips do support
LPDDR4X RAM which should greatly help
the platform’s performance with greater
memory bandwidth, better battery life, and
improved standby times. AMD claims
performance per watt has basically doubled
over Ryzen 3000 chips.RYZEN GAMING LAPTOPS
LOOK PRETTY AWESOME
AMD’s second set of Ryzen 4000 CPUs play
in the heavier gaming and content creation
arenas. Typically labeled as “H-class,” these
laptops have far more powerful 45-watt chips
and tend to slot into heavier laptops.
AMD is only offering two CPUs in this
category today: An 8-core, 16-thread Ryzen 7