AMD has provided many patches for the AMDGPU controller to support the company’s next generation of Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) called Renoir.
Renoir is the alleged successor to AMD’s current APU Picasso. Picasso is equipped with the 12nm manufacturing process and with Zen+ cores and Vega graphics. It is rumored that AMD Renoir will make the transition to the 7nm process node and present the latest Zen 2 microarchitecture as it was widely expected that Renoir would use Navi’s new graphics solution. However, recent updates to AMD’s open-source AMDGPU display driver have eliminated this rumor.
AMD Renoir could arrive with Vega 10 graphics cores
One line of code specifically mentions the GFX9, which we already know is the Vega ID as it identifies Navi with the GFX10 ID. If we continue to look at the other lines, Vega-10 silicon will also be mentioned, but Renoir’s Vega-10 may have a slight change. As a brief summary, the APUs Raven Ridge and Picasso are using AMD’s VCN (Video Core Next) 1.0 hardware. Renoir apparently uses VCN 2.0.
An unconfirmed AMD roadmap points to Renoir’s arrival in 2020, and if the start year is accurate, Renoir will compete against Intel’s 10nm Ice Lake chips with the Gen11 graphics solution. In an Intel comparison, his quad-core Ice Lake-U (ICL-U) chip hardly surpasses the similar quad-core Ryzen 7 3700U APU. It is important to note that the Ice Lake U processor ran on LPDDR4X-3733 memory, while the Ryzen was paired with DDR4-2400 memory. In any case, we expect Renoir to jump enough to defeat the Intel Ice Lake variants without any problems.