AMD Ryzen 4000 series Renoir APUs could come packing 36% more raw graphics power than their Ryzen 3000 APU predecessors. Discovered by leaker Komachi_Ensaka on Twitter (via Notebook Check), product listings suggest that the number of Vega Compute Units on AMD’s upcoming APUs may be increasing significantly – potentially to tackle Intel Ice Lake, upcoming Tiger Lake, and Nvidia’s discrete mobile GPUs.

Product listings suggest that AMD may be looking to increase the graphics silicon compute core count from today’s 11 CU limit with the Ryzen 5 3400G to anywhere between 12 to 15 CUs with its next-gen “Renoir” APUs. Due to the configuration of the CUs within today’s Raven Ridge APUs – three CUs share two cache blocks in a slice – the most efficient configurations would be 12 CUs (four slices) or 15 CUs (five slices).

The full compliment of 15 CUs is currently only speculative, but would potentially see shader count increase from 704 up to a potential 960 – making the company’s APUs highly competitive for mobile 720p/1080p gaming. Today’s Ryzen 5 3400G manages to hit above 60fps at 1080p in some titles, providing the quality is set to low, and are just enough to get by in some of today’s most popular competitive games.

The rumoured change also weighs in favour of previous rumours that AMD would be continuing to utilise its Vega GPU parts for Ryzen 4000 APUs – rather than its recently released 7nm Navi parts on the RDNA architecture.

The 12 CU part would reportedly be sold under the Ryzen 9 branding, previously reserved for only the best CPUs for gaming from the red team, the Ryzen 9 3900X and Ryzen 9 3950X.

A CU increase may even be necessary for AMD to maintain its strength in the APU market. Intel recently launched its Intel Ice Lake 10000-series mobile chips that dramatically increased Execution Unit counts within the on-board iGPU. These Iris Plus iGPUs fair much greater under gaming workloads than their paltry predecessors, and the company is said to be increase up to 96 EUs with its Tiger Lake CPUs next year – another significant boon to its graphical power.

AMD will be keen to keep the mobile graphics market on its side as it ramps up its efforts to win over market share from its bitter rival. So whether or not Ryzen 4000 dramatically increases graphical power or not, AMD better be rusting up something special on 7nm and beyond to maintain momentum.

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