Ryzen 4000 Mobile CPUs offer benchmark busting multi-core performance on the go, but marketing hype aside, it’s unclear how this will translate to real world performance gains for laptop users. Gamers are better off with low latency CPUs. At launch, the top GPU available in a 4000 series laptop is the RTX 2060. Since the GPU is largely responsible for overall gaming performance, the Ryzen 4000 laptops will offer mid tier gaming performance at best. Pairing stronger GPUs would be sub optimal because the Zen latency bottleneck becomes increasingly severe with more powerful GPUs.
Streamers and media producers, who have historically benefited from CPU cores, are better off using the GPU (NVENC or QuickSync) for encoding. Leading media creation applications including both DaVinci Resolve and Adobe Premiere Pro are largely GPU bound. Sixteen threads can indeed be useful in corner case workloads (UserBenchmark 64-core, Cinebench, Handbrake (CPU mode), Blender (CPU mode)) but for the majority of consumers most of the threads will remain idle. With low power consumption and high core counts, the 4000 range, on paper at least, is a perfect fit for the datacenter. AMD should focus on delivering a platform that offers performance where end users actually need it rather than targeting inexperienced gamers with the same old "moar cores" mantra.
