Ryzen 7000 Zen 4 CPUs Could Sport 1.1-GHz RDNA 2 iGPU

AMD briefly previewed the company’s upcoming Ryzen 7000 (codename Raphael) processors at CES 2022. Although the chipmaker has been tight-lipped about the specifications, a new AMD SMU (System Management Unit) driver reportedly exposes some details of the iGPU, however, there is no clear indication of core counts or if this SMU pertains to Zen 4 processors. 

Hardware detective Komachi_Ensaka speculates that Ryzen 7000’s iGPU may potentially come with two workgroup processors (WPG), allowing the iGPU to house up to four compute units. [EDIT: Komachi’s next post in his thread states that he is merely guessing, so take this with more than a little bit of salt.] 

With RDNA, AMD introduced the WGP concept to replace the compute unit (CU) for shader computation measurement. Each WGP contains two CUs, with each CU offering 64 stream processors (SPs). Therefore, if Komachi’s guess is correct, the Ryzen 7000’s iGPU would end up with 256 SPs.

AMD recently announced the Ryzen 6000 Rembrandt family of mobile chips with RDNA 2 graphics. Even the Ryzen 5 6600HS, the lowest end SKU, has six RDNA 2 CUs maxing out at 1.9 GHz. According to the AMD SMU driver, the RDNA 2-powered iGPU inside Ryzen 7000 may have a 1.1-GHz clock speed, although it didn’t specify if it’s the base or boost clock. 

The simple math shows that the Ryzen 7000 iGPU would offer up to 0.5 TFLOPs of maximum FP32 performance. For comparison, the Ryzen 5 6600HS delivers up to 1.5 TFLOPs, 3X the performance of the Zen 4 chip. However, it’s too early to determine if Ryzen 7000’s RDNA 2 graphics will be a worthwhile upgrade over Vega, which has been around for far too long. Also, FP32 performance isn’t the best metric for gaming performance, and the low clock speeds from the AMD SMU driver could be for an early engineering sample.

Designed to compete with the best CPUs, Ryzen 7000 features a revamped integrated heat spreader (IHS) and more pins. As a result, the new 5nm chips will drop into the AM5 socket, which has moved to a Land Grid Array (LGA) socket with 1,718 pins. 

So, while you could recycle your AM4 CPU cooler, you still need to shell out for a new motherboard and pricey DDR5 memory. Hopefully, availability and pricing for the latter will improve by then so more consumers can get aboard the DDR5 bandwagon. AMD’s Ryzen 7000 processors will hit the market in the second half of the year.