When it launched late March, the AMD Ryzen 9 4900H held the distinction of being the fastest notebook processor, the very first time AMD held the distinction, but only for a brief period before Intel launched its Core i9-10980HK to take back the performance lead. Over in the 15 W category, AMD's Ryzen 7 4800U is holding the fort on two fronts - against the "Comet Lake-U" and the "Ice Lake-U." According to reports, AMD wants to take another swing at this category with a new flagship Ryzen 9 series part.

Called the Ryzen 9 4900U, and unearthed from the User Benchmark database by TUM_APISAK, the new SKU is designed to compete with the Core i7-10710U and Core i7-1065G7, in the 15 W category. Lenovo had a notebook featuring this part listed earlier this year. It is configured with an 8-core/16-thread CPU clocked at 1.80 GHz nominal, with up to 4.30 GHz boost, which may seem like a minor speed bump, until you compare its User Benchmark scores with those of the 4800U. Apparently, the 4900U has some boost algorithm secret sauce that makes it a double-digit percentage faster than the 4800U in multi-threaded tests (possibly better spread of boost clocks across multiple cores). The iGPU appears unchanged, with 8 "Vega" compute units (512 stream processors), and up to 1750 MHz engine clocks.

A video posted by Notebook Italia may have spilled the beans on a whole new tier for AMD's mobile APUs. The video, which has since been taken down, showed Lenovo's upcoming Yoga Slim 14, which was listed in its specs list with an AMD Ryzen 9 4900U. Of course, the need for such an SKU is debatable: it's relatively unlikely AMD would bring more than 8 cores and 16 logical threads to the mobile landscape and its higher concern with autonomy rather than pure performance. Especially when one considers the particular Lenovo model involved: the Yoga lineup isn't so much associated with ultimate performance. However, there are desktop-replacement scenarios where users might definitely want to see a more than 8-core CPU powering their machine.

That said, this could simply be a higher clocked 8-core (the Ryzen 7 4800U does feature a base 1.8 GHz/up to 4.2 GHz boost clocks, so there's room for improvement). The Yoga Slim 14 where the Ryzen 9 4900U was listed does only weigh 1.1 Kg and has a quoted 11 hour battery life on the 4K screen option (versus 14 hours on the FHD version). We'll just have to wait and see, with our thinking hats on. A typo is possible, but hard to make in both the physical specs list on the pictures, and on the official Lenovo website. The fact that the original video has since been edited with the specs list obscured definitely means something's afoot. This could also be another AMD bullet for the mobile market, where it has achieved its biggest share growth in recent times.