AMD’s Super-Efficient Ryzen 7 PRO 6860Z APU Lands Within The Lenovo Thinkpad Z Laptop, Showcases The True Energy-Optimizations of Zen 3+
There aren’t a lot of details that AMD itself is sharing for the Ryzen 7 6860Z APU but one would guess that it is a higher-binned variant of the Ryzen 6850U. In their presentation, AMD states that the Ryzen 7 6860Z has been designed in deep collaboration with Lenovo which doesn’t sound that surprising since Lenovo has been getting that exclusive treatment from AMD for a while now (check Threadripper Pro). The AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6860Z APU is ‘Power-Optimized for industry-leading collaboration’. It will be featured on the Lenovo Thinkpad Z laptop on both 13" (Z13) and 16" (Z16) variants. The APU is outfitted with all the latest AMD PRO Security features and also has the Microsoft Pluton Security processor onboard the device. Other features include an FHD camera, an OLED display, and a Mic array. Once again, while no specifications are provided, this is an 8 core and 16 thread part based on the Zen 3+ and RDNA 2 core architectures. It is configured with a Radeon 680M iGPU and the specific configuration for the laptop (Lenovo Thinkpad Z13) includes 2x 16 GB LPDDR5-6400 memory, a 1 TB SSD, Windows 11 Pro operating system, and the 30.0 GPU driver. This is compared to Lenovo’s ThinkPad X1 Carbon with Intel’s Core i5-1260P which is a 12 core and 16 thread chip with a boost clock of up to 4.7 GHz and a maximum turbo power draw of 64W. The Intel laptop comes with 2x 8 GB LPDDR5-5500 memory, 1 TB SSD, Windows 11 Pro OS, and Intel’s Iris Xe integrated graphics. In the benchmarks, the AMD Ryzen 7 6860Z APU delivers up to 25% lead in Cinebench R23, 20% lead in 3DMark Time Spy, and up to a 50% lead in Passmark 10 versus the Intel Alder Lake laptop. Plus, the AMD laptop also runs cooler and consumes lower power leading to insane battery times that would last hours, an essential for any business platform. As for pricing, the Lenovo Thinkpad Z13 will have a starting price of $1549 US while the Z16 will retail for a starting price of $2099 US. The roundup of the new Thinkpad Z series is published over at XDA-Developers here. The Ryzen 7 6860Z will only be available with the Z13 laptop.
