Today we’re completing our testing of AMD’s Ryzen Mobile 4000 APUs with a look at the Ryzen 7 4700U and Ryzen 5 4500U, two mainstream chips in the series that have become available in a wider range of laptops in the past few weeks. Testing all of AMD’s Zen 2 APUs has been a challenge due to laptop availability – these chips launched way back in March – but today we can find several ultraportables from the likes of Lenovo, HP, Asus, Acer, and others sporting these processors, making this review to a must to follow up to our 4800U, 4800H, and other APU testing.
The Ryzen 7 4700U is AMD’s mainstream Ryzen 7 mobile processor, as it’s the most widely available chip in the series along with the Ryzen 5 4500U. You get 8 cores and 8 threads, so like the 4500U, there’s no SMT support, but we do get that increase from 6 to 8 cores.
With that comes a small base clock decrease down to 2.0 GHz, but a boost increase up to 4.1 GHz. There’s also 8 MB of L3 cache and 12MB of total cache on the processor. The CPU cores use the Zen 2 architecture and the entire chip is a monolithic die built on TSMC’s 7nm node.
| Model | Cores/ Threads |
Base Clock | Boost Clock | GPU CUs | GPU Cores | GPU Clock | TDP |
| Ryzen 7 4800U | 8/16 | 1.8 GHz | 4.2 GHz | 8 | 512 | 1750 MHz | 15W |
| Ryzen 7 4700U | 8/8 | 2.0 GHz | 4.1 GHz | 7 | 448 | 1600 MHz | 15W |
| Ryzen 5 4600U | 6/12 | 2.1 GHz | 4.0 GHz | 6 | 384 | 1500 MHz | 15W |
| Ryzen 5 4500U | 6/6 | 2.3 GHz | 4.0 GHz | 6 | 384 | 1500 MHz | 15W |
| Ryzen 3 4300U | 4/4 | 2.7 GHz | 3.7 GHz | 5 | 320 | 1400 MHz | 15W |
For the GPU, we see an increase over the Ryzen 5 4500U in both CU count and clock speed. We’re getting 7 CUs in the 4700U, one short of a fully unlocked GPU, plus a 1600 MHz maximum clock speed. The Vega architecture is used on Ryzen 4000’s graphics.
Sitting either side of the 4700U in this table are the two SMT-enabled parts, the 4800U and 4600U, and it’ll certainly be interesting to see how 8 cores and 8 threads compares to 6 cores and 12 threads in these mobile processors.
The test platform for today’s video is the HP Probook x360 435 G7, an enterprise focused system that comes with a lot of security and management features built-in despite HP choosing not to use AMD’s Pro SKUs. This is not the sort of laptop that we would personally buy and while some aspects to it are quite nice, we’re using it as a testbed primarily for the purpose of this review.
For testing the only change we made to the system was swapping out the 16GB single-channel memory that the laptop shipped with, for 16GB of dual-channel memory using the same DDR4-3200 spec. Using a single DIMM will adversely impact performance, that’s why we test all laptops using a dual-channel configuration and thus later comparisons are more straightforward.
Usual test notes also apply as well. This means we test all laptops and their APUs with the same power configurations, which gives us the most accurate apples-to-apples numbers we can achieve. This allows us to take a more generalized look at how the processors themselves perform, rather than how a specific laptop performs with any configuration the OEM decides to ship. Power is, of course, crucial to mobile hardware as there’s usually a hard power limit with these systems to fit everything into the constrained thermal design. So we keep everything here on an equal playing field.
The actual performance you see in a laptop will depend on how the manufacturer chooses to configure it, for example, whether they choose a 15W or 25W long term power limit, and how they configure the boost period. Sometimes you’ll see performance faster than we show, sometimes slower, but it’s important to keep this in mind.
We’ve tested the Ryzen 7 4700U in both 15W and 25W long term power configurations. In keeping with most Ryzen laptops we’ve tested, both configurations have a boost period where power is increased to around 35W for up to a few minutes. At 15W this boost period is roughly 2 minutes, and at 25W it’s roughly 5 minutes. Again, not all laptops will follow this pattern, but it’s a common configuration. We’ll be focusing on the 15W numbers today, but the 25W results are also in the charts. Let’s get into it.
Benchmarks
Starting with Cinebench R20 as usual, the Ryzen 7 4700U is impressive. With 8 cores and 8 threads, the 4700U is almost twice as fast as the quad-core Core i7-1065G7 in this multi-thread workload, and also 60% ahead of the six-core Core i7-10710U. There’s no doubting the latest Ryzen 7 parts are offering class leading multi-thread performance by a mile.
Single thread performance is also respectable, coming in slightly faster than the 1065G7. Not a big margin there by any stretch, but considering where AMD used to be in mobile, matching what Intel has to offer is a good result.
However, there are more interesting numbers to consider here. While the 4700U is 20% faster than the 4500U in multi-thread and 5% faster for single-thread, the 8 core 8 thread design isn’t faster than the 6 core 12 thread Ryzen 5 Pro 4650U a.k.a. Ryzen 5 4600U. We’re looking at essentially the same performance.
The 4700U does lead for single-thread, but is slightly slower for multi-thread. At first glance this might be a bit strange, but the benchmark numbers from AMD’s launch event only show a 4% margin between these parts in Cinebench, the smallest margin between any of the Ryzen parts. So we guess from that perspective it’s not that unusual to see a result like this.
There’s also quite a significant gap to the Ryzen 7 4800U. Adding SMT to the 8 core part, and perhaps with better binning as well, allows the 4800U to be 30 percent faster in this workload. For reference, adding SMT to the six core SKUs improved performance by 22 percent. So that’s just another interesting point to note.
In Handbrake, the 4700U is marginally faster than the 4650U, in keeping with what we saw in Cinebench. It just seems like the 8C/8T design has similar overall efficiency for multi-core workloads relative to the 6C/12T approach when kept to the same power levels. However that’s just comparing AMD to AMD.
The 4700U is 92% faster than the Core i7-1065G7 in this workload, showing Ryzen’s dominance over Ice Lake for any serious multi-core productivity work.
Blender is another workload where the 4700U is quite faster than Ice Lake, but the margins do close up relative to other AMD processors. The 4700U is actually slower than the 4650U here, and only 6 percent ahead of the 4500U.
So there’s still a performance gap between Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 parts, at least the most common SKUs in that series. The gap is not as significant as in Handbrake or Cinebench where margins were closer to 20 percent.
The 4700U remains a powerful processor for code compilation relative to lower tier U-series parts. For GCC compilation, the 4700U is 62% faster than the 1065G7 as it’s able to harness its lead in both single thread and multi thread processing.
We’re seeing just an 11% margin compared to the 4500U though, so Ryzen 5 is presenting a lot of value. Similar results for Chromium compilation as well if you are interested, this is a very long workload to run.
For Microsoft Excel, this is a situation where the 8 core, 8 thread design is better than 6 cores with 12 threads. Our number crunching benchmark presents a 25% lead for the 4700U over the 1065G7, but also quite large leads over the 4500U, at nearly 30%.
Then the 4800U is another step up and like a lot of the workloads we’ve been showing so far, AMD’s top of the line processor is definitely one to look out for with class leading performance.
In PCMark’s productivity workload, the Ryzen 7 4700U is a capable chip that delivers excellent results for tasks that are quite common on a U-series notebook. The 8 core design without SMT is favored here over the SMT design in an outlier among our testing, leading to around a 10 percent improvement over other processors you might be considering like the 4500U or Ice Lake.
The Essentials workload, which covers app loading and web browsing, the 4700U is a strong performer but it’s not that much faster than other U-series chips.
There’s just a few percent either way between most Ryzen APUs and Ice Lake, so right now there isn’t much separating Renoir and Intel’s 10th-gen parts. The 4800U does take a step above these chips, but for a lot of the basic stuff you’ll be doing on a laptop, the 4700U is very capable.
Ryzen is an absolute beast for decompression, offering a huge performance lead over Intel. However, what we’ve seen in previous reviews is that AMD’s chips really benefit from SMT in this test.
The 4800U is 60% faster in this workload with its 16 versus 8 threads, and the 4650U with 12 threads is also a faster chip. With that said, cores are also important, allowing the 4700U to hold a 30 percent lead over the 4500U.
In MATLAB, there’s not much separating the 4700U from 4500U, both deliver very similar performance and again the SMT-enabled parts are superior. Because of this, Ice Lake gets a rare win over the 4700U here, although it loses to the 4800U overall.
We also see a very small performance lead for Ice Lake in Acrobat PDF to PNG exporting but in this single-thread workload margins are tight and quite similar to other single-core tests.
The final productivity test we’re looking at is Adobe Photoshop. Like several other lightly-threaded workloads we’ve been looking at, we don’t see huge margins between most U-series processors.
The 4700U at 15W ended up 5% ahead of the i7-1065G7, and about 12% ahead of the Ryzen 5 4500U. Those are decent gains and definitely a reason to upgrade from a Ryzen 5 to Ryzen 7 part for people that do a lot of image editing on their devices.
Gaming Performance
Now time for some gaming benchmarks, to see how the extra compute unit and higher clock speeds translate into gains. In GTA V which also hits the CPU quite hard, there isn’t much separating the Ryzen 7 4700U and 4800U, despite the 4800U having the faster GPU.
The CPU does appear to be playing a role here, and it delivers strong performance overall. We are seeing small gains on lower tier products like the 4500U and 4650U.
In Civilization VI, the 4700U isn’t much faster than the 4500U or 4650U at 15W, there just isn’t a ton of headroom for this chip to show what is has to offer. But at 25W, the taps are opened a bit and the 4700U ends up pulling away, with average frame rates about 10% higher than the six-core models.
While the 4650U, for example, doesn’t benefit much in this title from a higher power limit, the 4700U and also 4800U do benefit, so it’s worth being on the lookout for laptops that can handle more juice.
In CS: GO, performance is good, especially at 25W, where the Ryzen 7 part is able to average over 100 FPS. We’re not quite at the performance levels Ice Lake can deliver at 25W, but overall performance is good and we’d say these sorts of laptops are good enough for light esports titles at a native 1080p with competitive settings.
Gears 5 is a heavily GPU limited game running at Medium settings, and so far no integrated GPU is capable of a consistent 30 FPS experience at these settings. With that said, the 4700U is one of the better APUs here. This chip outperforms Ice Lake at 25W with a 37% margin, and narrowly beats the MX250 as well, when paired with the 1065G7.
The 4800U is still the faster chip with a fully unlocked Vega design, it’s about 16% ahead here, but the 4700U itself is 17% faster than the 4500U, so definitely a good reason to upgrade when paired with the other advantages of this chip.
The 4700U also delivers great performance in F1 2019 with the Ultra Low preset for an ultraportable. The 7 compute unit design stretches its legs here, particularly at 25W, delivering 44 FPS on average which is playable.
Performance Summary
When reviewing the benchmark data on a head to head comparison, we see a similar story to past Ryzen reviews when comparing the Ryzen 7 4700U to the Core i7-1065G7.
In multi-thread workloads, the 8 core design even without SMT is able to deliver up to twice the performance, with strong leads in important tasks like 7-Zip decompression and code compilation. The 4700U is also competitive in single-thread tests, holding its own for basic productivity tasks and photo editing. It’s not a universally faster processor, but when the 4700U is faster, it tends to be a lot faster.
There are also plenty of reasons to upgrade your laptop from a 4500U to 4700U configuration during the purchase process. You can expect 20-30 percent better multi-thread performance, which is good scaling from the addition of two cores in the same power envelope.
The 4700U also has the advantage of higher single-core turbo clocks, so 1T applications and basic tasks are faster, too. Getting 10% better performance in Photoshop is good for moving up a tier.
Where things get really interesting is comparing the 4700U to the 4650U. The 8 core 8 thread design does not appear to be more efficient than the 6 core 12 thread model in all workloads.
There are times when the 4700U is faster, like in Handbrake and Excel, but other times where the 4650U is faster, like code compilation and Blender. The 4700U does have the edge in gaming and lightly threaded tasks due to its higher spec configuration, but it’s clear that adding more cores isn’t necessarily better than just adding SMT.
As for the Ryzen 7 4700U versus 4800U, well it’s clear the 4700U is quite a bit slower in most workloads. We’re seeing 20 to 30 percent worse performance in multi-thread workloads, and single digit differences for lightly threaded tasks. The 4800U is a very powerful chip at 15W and sits at the top of AMD’s product stack for a reason.
We think it’s also worth showing just how much faster the 4700U is over the 3700U.
The Ryzen 7 4700U is twice as fast in many multi-thread workloads, and up to 2.5x faster in Handbrake, where the new Zen 2 architecture is a lot better for handling that sort of test. Then for single-thread, the 3700U was really terrible. The 4700U is 30 to 40 percent faster, which is just crazy.
What We Learned
Having covered all key products in AMD’s mobile lineup, we now have a pretty comprehensive look at Ryzen Mobile 4000 spanning both the U and H series. In case you want to take a look, see our previous reviews for the 4800U, 4800H, 4900HS, 4600H and 4500U.
There’s a few chips still missing that we haven’t tested, like the Ryzen 3 4300U, but we’ve covered all the big ones.
The 4700U is much faster for multi-threaded workloads and roughly equal for single-thread relative to Ice Lake. And while we could spend much of this conclusion going through how much faster the 4700U is over Intel’s 10th-gen processors, the fact is Intel is nearly ready to drop 11th-gen Tiger Lake, which will bring a boost to both single core and multi-threaded performance. Previews show Intel is getting an edge in single threaded tasks again, while unable to match Ryzen for multi-thread.
We expect Tiger Lake to show up this holiday season in numerous laptops, in the meantime, let’s stick to the new and interesting takeaways from this testing.
There is a decent performance gain between the Ryzen 5 4500U and Ryzen 7 4700U. These are the two most common Ryzen chips on the market and are the two configurations offered for most Ryzen laptops, so the difference between them we’re sure is of interest to a lot of people.
Previously, with many Intel generations there wasn’t much separating Core i5 and Core i7 mobile CPUs. With Skylake back in 2015, for example, both i5 and i7 models had 2 cores and 4 threads, and the same GPU. The difference usually amounted to cache and clock speeds. The Core i7 was a bit higher specced, so you got a small performance upgrade. Even today, there’s limited segmentation in Intel’s line-up.
With Ryzen, the 4700U offers 20% gains on the 4500U in multi-thread workloads thanks to those two extra cores. That may give buyers a legitimate incentive to upgrade. You also get faster single-thread performance and better GPU performance, too, so the overall difference between these chips is significant.
We think today’s review also answers the question of why the Ryzen 5 4600U is totally absent in the market. There’s not much of a performance difference between it and the 4700U. In our opinion, having both the 4600U and 4700U is a bit unnecessary, we really only need one, and OEMs seem to think so as well. Their choice to favor the Ryzen 7 part, with its more marketable name and ability to be sold at higher price points makes sense from their perspective.
Anyone that’s bought a Ryzen 7 4700U device over the last few months it’s been available should be pretty happy with what they’ve received. It’s certainly a better choice performance-wise than any Ice Lake or Comet Lake processor, and we wouldn’t recommend anyone buy a 10th-gen Intel laptop with Tiger Lake’s release now imminent.
We do expect a fierce battle between Intel and AMD in the months ahead. So while the Ryzen 7 4700U is an excellent buy right now, when Tiger Lake hits the market that may change. In particular, we’d expect Tiger Lake to make strides forward in GPU and single-thread performance.