Swift gets faster with Ryzen 4000

Almost two years ago, we had the opportunity to test Acer’s Swift 3 laptop with AMD’s first Ryzen mobile platform, Raven Ridge. Acer has been a strong partner for AMD, generally one of the first to come up with new designs with the latest AMD platforms, and this year that partnership has been re-developed. Today we take a look at the latest AMD APU offering, the Ryzen 4000 “Renoir”, which is at the heart of Acer’s latest version of the 14-inch Swift 3.. With a new AMD processor and some innovations in the Swift 3 design itself, both AMD and Acer have made some tremendous improvements for 2020.

Ryzen 7 4700U

The big news for 2020 is AMD’s new APU platform, codenamed Renoir. Selling as the Ryzen 4000 series, these new APUs bring a number of major updates to AMD’s platform, as the company further sandblasts the rough edges of the Ryzen 3000 Picasso series. The key to this is a much-needed leap from the GlobalFoundries 12nm process to the class-leading 7nm process of TSMC, giving AMD a much-desired boost in transistor performance and overall energy efficiency. Along with a host of additional optimizations at the chip and driver level, and AMD’s latest APUs are proving to be far more suitable for thin and light mobile designs than their predecessors.

Under the hood, like the AMD desktop processors introduced last year, the new Ryzen 4000 series APUs are AMD’s first laptop-centric products to feature their Zen 2 CPU cores. Designed hand in hand with the TSMC’s 7nm process, Zen 2 architecture has further increased AMD’s performance at IPC and clock speeds, and small cores have allowed AMD to come out with 8 of them even on a laptop APU. Meanwhile, the iGPU is based on the same Vega architecture graphics as the 2000 and 3000 series APUs, but in a new configuration. Thanks to TSMC’s 7nm process, AMD has been able to boost GPU frequency much more than before, all the more so that it has actually reduced the number of GPU compute units, while promising better GPU performance with compared to the previous generation of APUs.

Ian had a chance to test the new Ryzen 4000 platform in early April, though that sample was the 45-watt H-series. However, a lot of the concepts carry over, so if you haven’t had a chance to catch up with Renoir yet, be sure to check out the Ryzen 9 4900HS review. The 45-watt range of processors is pretty much the standard on high-performance laptops, but the vast majority of laptops on the market stick to the lower-wattage 15-watt range, which is what we have on the Acer Swift 3.

Acer has opted for what is probably one of the most popular SKUs in the AMD Ryzen 4000 range, the Ryzen 7 4700U. AMD has taken a very unconventional route for this part, offering eight physical CPU cores, but disabling simultaneous multithreading (SMT). AMD’s entire line of 45-watt H-series processors offers SMT, but only two of the new U-series offer this, with the Ryzen 5 4600U offering 6 cores and 12 threads, and the Ryzen 7 4800U providing 8 cores. and 16-wire, all at the 15-watt thermal design power (TDP) that’s so common in laptops. In the typical 15-watt laptop space, AMD is the first to offer 8 cores, but not always with SMT.

On the GPU side, the Ryzen 7 4700U offers 7 compute units (CU) with Vega architecture, with a maximum clock speed of 1600 MHz. Compared to the previous generation Ryzen 7 3700U, the GPU drops three units of computation, but it increases the maximum frequency from 1300 MHz to 1600 MHz, so we will see where this develops in terms of performance.

The Acer Swift 3

Acer has managed to group a large number of products in the Swift 3. The 14-inch laptop has a 1920×1080 IPS screen that, although it lacks touch support, shows well thanks to the slim frame of the Swift 3 bezel. It ships with 8GB of DDR4-3200, and while we’d have loved to see LPDDR4X, capacity is what’s important here, and 8GB is a fair amount for a budget laptop like the Swift 3. Also, Acer has managed to equip this laptop. with a 512 GB SSD, which is fantastic. They will also offer a less expensive version with a Ryzen 5 4500U, 8GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD.

Despite solid APU, RAM, and storage offerings, Acer hasn’t ended there. The Swift 3 also features Wi-Fi 6 thanks to Intel’s AX200 wireless adapter, which means 2.4 / 5.0 GHz wireless support with 160 Mhz channels if your router has the correct capabilities. There’s also a built-in fingerprint reader for Windows Hello Support, and the entire package is contained in an aluminum chassis that weighs just 1.2 kg / 2.65 lbs. Considering the MSRP of $ 649, this is an incredible value.