AMD Introduces First Two Ultrathin-bound Ryzen Mobile Processors

When AMD launched its Ryzen series of processors earlier this year, many (including me) exclaimed such things as, “Finally! AMD’s CPUs are relevant on desktops again!” That couldn’t have been more true. Before Ryzen, I can’t recall the last time a friend or even an acquaintance bought an AMD CPU for their main rig, but today? I see it split down the middle; some still prefer to stick with Intel due to the higher IPC, while the others believe the best bang-for-the-buck is on the AMD side.

Nonetheless, if AMD was irrelevant on the desktop side right before Ryzen dropped, I’m not sure what word would be appropriate to describe its notebook presence. Pretty much non-existent in recent years, and for obvious reasons: power-hungry processors don’t belong in notebooks. Fortunately for AMD, Ryzen is not a power-hungry processor, and that means just one thing: it belongs in notebooks.

Ryzen in notebooks is noteworthy enough, but what makes the upcoming mobile chips even more interesting is the fact that they pack AMD’s Vega cores into the integrated graphics. It goes without saying that AMD does graphics really well, so thin and light notebooks with the best kind of gaming performance we’ve seen in such models should be more than possible.

That said, it does kind of stand out that while Zen is crazy efficient in CPUs, Vega is not crazy efficient on GPUs, so it will be interesting to see, ultimately, how battery life on these Zen-based notebooks will be versus the Intel CPU+GPU competition.

With the Ryzen 7 2700U and Ryzen 5 2500U, AMD claims to deliver upwards of 3x CPU performance in ultrathin notebooks, and up to 2.3x the GPU performance. On paper, these performance uplifts are actually believable, because current ultrathins peak at 4 available threads, whereas AMD is giving us eight to play with here. As for the IGP, AMD has historically delivered a better experience over Intel. That’s exactly why people have wanted to see AMD IGPs in Intel CPUs; or, rather, it’s at least why the rumor of that happening refuses to die.

To improve single-threaded performance (which, for the record, encompasses the majority of your computing), AMD’s deploying a feature called Precision Boost 2, allowing the CPU to decide whether it’s better to provide additional cycles to a single process, or spread them over multiple. This means that if only one thread is being stressed, it will enjoy the highest possible clock speed; two would still have a boosted clock speed, but to a less degree. If all of the threads are stressed, a much lower peak is achieved, but it’s even across all of the threads. If this mechanic sounds familiar, it’s because it’s not new. However, AMD’s algorithms are far more sophisticated that before, so that’s what’s ultimately noteworthy here.

We’ve all heard promises like those that AMD is making now, and all-too-often, they’re not lived up to. Based on what we know of Ryzen on the desktop, though, Ryzen on mobile strikes me as a serious force to be reckoned with. AMD’s CPUs used to be power hogs, but no more. People can get more multi-threaded performance at the same kind of power cost as previous generation chips with half the threads. Throw Vega in there, and some truly compelling ultrathin notebooks could result. CES is going to be quite interesting!