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AMD announced its new Ryzen Mobile APUs today, kicking off what's arguably its virtually of import refresh of 2017. Over the past decade, laptops have accounted for a steadily growing percentage of the total PC market. At the same time, however, AMD was forced to fight a defensive rear-guard action with a CPU design that was fundamentally unsuited to high-efficiency, depression-power operation. As of today, that's (hopefully) changing.

Similar Intel, AMD is taking a staggered arroyo to its rollout and launching just 2 new mobile parts: Ryzen 7 2700U and Ryzen 5 2500U. Both new cores are 15W parts; a summary of the 2 chips and comparison to their closest Intel counterparts is shown below:

AMD-vs-Intel

Right off the bat, there are some obvious differences between the Intel and AMD products. The Ryzen vii 2700U has 640 GPU cores at a maximum GPU clock of 1.3GHz, while the Ryzen 5 2500U has 512 GPU cores at a maximum GPU clock of ane.1GHz. In both cases, AMD nearly certainly outclasses Intel'due south graphics operation. While Intel's integrated solutions are far better than what the company used to field, AMD has historically had an edge in this market.

As far as CPU performance is concerned, AMD and Intel are pursuing different strategies. Intel has significantly lower base clocks, just moderately higher turbo frequencies. How well the fries compare will depend significantly on the specifics of each laptop's design. If both chips are limited to their base frequencies, AMD will take a significant edge, while Intel will enjoy a clock reward if both CPUs can run at full turbo frequency. AMD has also left itself a little room to maneuver on GPU functioning; in that location are eleven Vega Compute Units on these APUs, not only 10. Adding more than cores only boosts integrated GPU operation only so much — these systems are typically memory constrained — but it'southward a bit of extra oomph if AMD needs information technology later.

Raven Ridge Takes Flight

Given how long information technology's been since AMD fielded a truly competitive mobile product, it's worth stepping through what these new Raven Ridge CPUs evangelize. In the slideshow beneath, we comprehend the specific improvements AMD is introducing with Ryzen Mobile, including some new features that Ryzen desktop doesn't yet have. Each slide tin can be clicked to open it in a new window.

I've long maintained that AMD'southward engineers deserve some kind of award for turning Bulldozer into a CPU that could run inside a 15W TDP, only these new Ryzen Mobile capabilities show how important information technology is to showtime from a fundamentally potent architecture. Some of these gains are courtesy of the motility to 14nm manufacturing, just even that improvement merely goes so far. Ryzen's vastly improved efficiency gives AMD flexibility that Carrizo could never deliver.

In the next slide deck we'll stride through AMD's various operation comparisons and claims. As before, click on each slide to open it in a new window.

Ryzen Mobile is an impressive APU on newspaper, with strong CPU and GPU performance and far better competitive positioning than anything we've seen from the company since at least Llano, and peradventure before. How strong information technology'll be versus Intel is something we'll have to wait to find out, but in that location are some concerns in that area.

Systemic Challenges

AMD has announced three laptops that will ship with Ryzen Mobile APUs in the near future. Ane thing to be aware of is that of the 3 laptops AMD specifically announced yesterday, simply two of them — the HP Envy X360 and the Acer Swift three — offer dual-channel DDR4-2400 configurations with up to 8GB of RAM.

HP-Envy

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The HP organisation but includes the Ryzen 5 2500U, merely it has a 512GB SSD choice, a larger battery, touch display, and USB Type-C. As the name implies, this laptop has a rotating hinge and can be used in tablet or tent way also. Pricing starts at $699.

Acer-Swift3

Click to enlarge

The Acer Swift 3 is designed for a 25W CPU and can take advantage of Ryzen Mobile's XFR clock rates. It offers a 256GB SSD, IPS display, and (assuming it's well-designed) likely higher CPU perf than the HP, cheers to its increased TDP.

Lenovo-IdeaPad

Click to overstate

The Lenovo IdeaPad 720S is the thinnest and lightest organization of the three, only it's also the least compelling from a performance standpoint. This system is limited to a unmarried-channel DDR4-2133 configuration. It's prissy to run across AMD winning space in this kind of system, but exist aware of the memory configuration limitation (Intel-based IdeaPad 700s, for what it's worth, seem to be similarly constrained).

If AMD wants to retake market share from Intel above the low-cease space, it'll demand to convince OEMs to market place these systems equivalently, and work with companies similar Best Buy to train staff in why an AMD solution is equal-to or better than an Intel configuration. There's considerably more upside with Ryzen Mobile than there e'er was with Carrizo, only the lack of a channel marketplace ways AMD can't sell these chips to people who want to DIY a laptop the way it can in desktop.

Still, based on what we can evaluate today, Ryzen Mobile is the strongest mobile product AMD has brought to market in years. There are notwithstanding some substantial questions most how all this will play out in-market and how shipping solutions volition compare against each other, but Ryzen Mobile obviously beats the pants off Carrizo and, if AMD's tests are remotely accurate, it should have no problem competing with Intel at a range of toll points and organization configurations.