Ever wondered why we never saw Ryzen/Radeon laptops?
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Last year, AMD introduced its Renoir APU processors in the form of the Ryzen 4000 family. Among the high-performance units, we saw chips like AMD Ryzen 5 4600H, AMD Ryzen 7 4800H or AMD Ryzen 9 4900H. Throughout 2020, however, we didn't get any notebook model that was equipped with one of these processors and a graphics card at least at the level of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070. The most efficient configurations, as they appeared, had at most a GeForce RTX 2060. For people who wanted to switch to AMD processor with Zen 2 cores, this situation was not very comfortable. The top graphics were paired with inferior in terms of energy efficiency, Intel Comet Lake-H processors. Admittedly, last year there was an explanation for this state of affairs. However, from the beginning it was unconvincing for many people.
Back in July of last year, news broke about the alleged limitations of AMD Ryzen 4000 series processors. It was exactly about the number of PCIe 3.0 lines that were dedicated to graphics cards. Renoir APUs were compatible with the PCIe 3.0 x8 interface, which means that a maximum of 8 PCIe 3.0 lines were dedicated for dGPUs. Some OEMs admitted that these limitations (Intel offered 16 lines for a graphics card) cause a reduction in the maximum performance of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 graphics cards and above. For this reason, there was not a single notebook on the market with this configuration. From the information we got to, it is clear that the mentioned reason was just a smokescreen and not the real reason.
One OEM has finally secretly admitted that the real reason for this was an internal agreement between Intel and NVIDA whereby the most powerful graphics cards from the Turing family could only be bundled with Intel's 10th generation processors. Unfortunately, we don't know what exact terms and/or amounts were at stake, but the whole thing must have undoubtedly involved large sums of money, since no OEM broke out and prepared laptops based on AMD processors. Interestingly, this year's AMD Ryzen 5000-H (Cezanne-H) processors also feature a maximum of 8 PCIe 3.0 lines for a graphics card, so theoretically you could use the identical excuse as a year ago. However, AMD's abundant processor offerings for 2021 plus Intel's continued problems with the implementation of the 8-core Tiger Lake-H45 chips have led to some laptop manufacturers breaking out of their previous arrangements, and that includes NVIDIA itself. We already know that ASUS and Lenovo have broken out of this circle. Other manufacturers are also preparing their proposals for laptops with AMD Ryzen 5000 and powerful NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3000 cards. The only manufacturers that will still stick to only Intel and NVIDIA RTX 3000 chips in one set will be Dell and Razer.
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