The AMD Ryzen 7 4980U is a Renoir family processor designed for certain Microsoft Surface systems. 4980U has eight Zen 2 cores clocked at 2.0 GHz (base clock speed) to 4.4 GHz (Boost) with thread-doubling SMT tech enabled for a total of 16 threads. The chip is manufactured on the modern 7 nm TSMC process and partly thanks to that AMD promises a 2x improvement in performance-per-Watt over Ryzen 3000 series mobile CPUs.

Architecture

The Zen 2 microarchitecture has brought a sizeable per-thread performance boost compared to the outgoing Zen+ parts. Renoir product family is also the first to introduce 8-core ULV processors to laptop market, keeping power consumption within reasonable limits. This AMD processor family is very impressive from most perspectives. One of the disatvantages to keep in mind is the lack of PCI-Express 4 support, meaning these blazing-fast NVMe SSDs will be limited to 3.9 GB/s tops.

Ryzen 7 4980U is designed to work with quad-channel LPDDR4 memory at up to 4,267 MHz. 8 MB of Level 3 are present in this chip. The Ryzen 7 gets soldered straight to the motherboard (FP6 socket) and is thus not user-replaceable. Please go to our Renoir hub page for more information on the product family.

Performance

4980U is the fastest ULV Ryzen 4000 series model. As such, its clock speeds are 200 MHz higher (both the base and Boost) compared to the older Ryzen 7 4800U. We fully expect the new Zen 3 based Ryzen 7 5800U to be even faster thanks to the new architecture. In the meantime, 4980U proves to be nearly as fast as an i7-10870H in multi-core benchmarks while bending the knee to older Intel CPUs, such as the i5-8300H, when under single-thread load.

Graphics

In addition to its eight CPU cores, the Ryzen 7 also features the Radeon RX Vega 8 graphics adapter with 8 CUs (= 512 shaders) at up to 1,950 MHz. This iGPU is compatible with FreeSync and DirectX 12 and is able to HW-decode AVC, HEVC, VP9-encoded videos (no AV1 support here). Vega 8 is capable of outputting UHD 2160p60 video signal to several monitors and, similar to Intel's Iris Xe (80 EUs), is good enough for a bit of light gaming on the go, provided one is content with sub-1080p resolutions and low/medium quailty presets.

Power consumption

The APU has a default TDP, also known as the long-term power limit, of 15 W; much like with other U-class Ryzen 4000 processors, AMD is fine with laptop manufacturers (Microsoft, in this case) changing that value to anything between 10 W and 25 W. The 7 nm TSMC process this Ryzen 7 is built with makes for above average, as of mid-2022, energy efficiency. All in all, Ryzen 7 4980U is not just powerful; it's also anything but a power hog.