AMD Announces Ryzen 9 4900H and 4900HS: The Halo 35 W and 45 W Mobile APUs

As part of the disclosures on AMD’s Ryzen Mobile 4000 portfolio, the company is also lifting the lid on perhaps one of the worst kept secrets in mobile computing: the new top-of-the-line Ryzen 9 4900H family. This family consists of two processors, the standard H model built for 45 W operation, and the HS model at 35 W. These parts will offer more frequency and more graphics performance than the rest of AMD’s offerings, and are the only APUs from AMD to carry the weight of the Ryzen 9 branding.

We saw from AMD’s first announcement of its Ryzen Mobile 4000 family back in January that it was eager to attack the notebook market with its Zen 2-based 7nm products, featuring up to 8 cores and an updated Vega graphics engine. With the Zen 2 cores being a resounding success on the desktop in chiplet form, the monolithic APU market is where AMD has to ride over previous barriers to performance and marketability, and the belief in the company is that it will do so through 2020 with a combination of high performance x86 products delivering ‘superior’ graphics performance all while achieving multiple design wins. In January we saw several of those design wins in the flesh, such as the ASUS Zephyrus G14, the only 14-inch laptop with both a H-class processor and a discrete GPU, as well as an array of thin and light designs all based on the U-series family.

ASUS Zephyrus G14, with Ryzen 7 4800HS

The Ryzen 9 offerings from AMD are meant to be designated the best of the best, and one of the announcements missing in January was a mobile-class Ryzen 9 processor. Despite the lack of AMD mentioning one, it was a number of AMD’s OEM partners that spoke out of turn, showcasing various notebook designs with labels such as ‘Up to AMD Ryzen 9’ on the packaging, indicating that we were set to see a Ryzen 9 product in the portfolio. The official announcement is today, with the Ryzen 9 4900H and the Ryzen 9 4900HS.

AMD’s H processors have a TDP of 45 W, indicating that at sustained load (with enough temperature headroom), the CPU will run at 45 W, and try and take the best frequency it can at 45 W.

The HS processors are a bit different to the H processors. They mostly have the same frequencies (except the Ryzen 9), but are labelled as 35 W in the default configuration. That means it will still try and aim for the best frequency, but the sustained power consumption is only 35 W. Not everyone can buy the HS processor – AMD reserves these parts for OEM partners that it works in tandem with to give the best experience. The first HS system into the market will be that ASUS Zephyrus G14, and that system will have a short exclusivity on the Ryzen 7 version parts.

Note that the normal H processors can also be set at 35 W by the OEM, but that won’t make them a HS processor – the S means that AMD has validated the design, and AMD has the units in house and pre-tests any updates to the notebooks before the updates get released. This comes from AMD’s two Continuous Validation Labs, one in Austin and one in Shanghai. We (the press) postulated that the ‘HS’ stands for ‘High School’, with these parts being targeted for the back-to-school designs. AMD corrected us, saying that the H is just the class, and the S stands for Special.

With regards the Ryzen 9 processors, AMD initially actually only gave us the specifications of the 4900HS, with the 4900H ‘to be disclosed'. This could have been for two reasons – firstly that the 4900HS might be the only model we’ll see, that AMD wants to keep it for those designs formed from collaboration with OEMs, or secondly that it’s a high enough binning of a chip that they want to dedicate the first batches to those collaborations. In the end, the day before this announcement, we discovered the details in the latest version of the slide decks. Nonetheless, the Ryzen 9 4900HS sits +100 MHz above the Ryzen 7 parts, with one extra compute unit and +150 MHz on the graphics frequency, and the Ryzen 9 4900H is +300 MHz on the base over the 4900HS, and +100 MHz on the turbo.  All the parts are PCIe 3.0, for power reasons.

The Ryzen 9 4900H and Ryzen 9 4900HS are expected to hit the market in the Spring (Q2?) of 2020. Given the recent global situation, it might be out in China before it comes to the rest of the world.

Related Reading

• AMD Ryzen Mobile 4000: Measuring Renoir’s Die Size
• AMD Ryzen 4000 Mobile APUs: 7nm, 8-core on both 15W and 45W, Coming Q1
• AMD Zen 2 Microarchitecture Analysis: Ryzen 3000 and EPYC Rome