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AMD bring 1080p gaming performance to ultrabooks with their Ryzen Mobile APUs

AMD Ryzen Ridge

AMD have been busy tearing Ryzen and Vega limb-from-limb all year, in search of the perfect components to finish their Frankenstein’s monster APUs that they call Raven Ridge. The incoming reign of terror over the competition has been a long time coming since Ryzen’s launch, yet now it seems that not only are AMD launching their Raven Ridge processors before the end of the year, they are also packing them to the brim with performance.

Want something to compare the Ryzen Mobile APUs to? Check out list of the best gaming CPUs out there.

 

 

At the core of AMD’s latest Ryzen Mobile processors is their Infinity Fabric – the same one used to weave together the cacophony of cores found on AMD’s high-end Threadripper family of products. Utilising this connectivity tech, AMD have fused together four Zen cores with simultaneous hyperthreading for a total of eight threads, and ten or eight Vega Compute Units, on the Ryzen 7 2700U and Ryzen 5 2500U respectively.

3DMark Raven Ridge

Both Ryzen Mobile processors feature lower clockspeeds than their Bulldozer-based predecessors, with the 2700U at 2.2GHz base clock, and 3.8GHz boost, and the 2500U at 2.0GHz base, and 3.6GHz boost. Despite their lower clockspeeds, they are more than capable of vanquishing their ageing seventh generation siblings, thanks to the massive IPC (instruction-per-clock) gains of the Zen architecture.

The Infinity Fabric allows for more than just super-fast communication between clients in the chip, it also gives AMD advanced monitoring capability. This allows AMD to not only include the full SenseMI suite with their Ryzen Mobile APUs, but also upgrade Precision Boost to the aptly named Precision Boost 2.0, and bring XFR to mobile with mXFR. Both will allow for higher average and peak clockspeeds, dependent on application and OEM thermal design.

Raven Ridge won’t be stuffing 4K capable graphics into a laptop no thicker than a chocolate bar, but it will offer playable FPS in a range of the least graphically demanding titles popular today in a package no larger than 1.38mm thick.

AMD Raven Ridge gaming benchmarks

The Ryzen 7 2700U’s ten Vega CUs manage to push 1080p in both Dota 2 and CS:GO, at an average frame rate of 49fps. In Overwatch, the 2700U manages at admirable 66fps average, although graphics settings had to be dropped pretty considerably to reach these numbers. The ever-popular League of Legends runs at a happy 59fps average on 1080p and medium settings.

In 3DMark Time Spy, the Ryzen Mobile 2700U reaches a score of 915, more than double AMD’s last generation FX 9800P APU, posting a score of 400. As you might expect, Intel’s integrated graphics do not manage to keep up with the graphically-inclined APU, with the i7 8550U and i7 7500U scoring 350, and 377 respectively.

AMD Raven Ridge Cinebench

The HP Envy X360, Lenovo Ideapad 720S, and Acer Swift 3 are the first ‘vanguard’ products built upon Ryzen Mobile, and will be making their way onto shelves before the end of the year – all of which AMD assure will be easily available to purchase at launch. Further ultra-slim laptops will likely arrive at the start of 2018, alongside desktop AM4 compatible Raven Ridge APUs.

AMD have accomplished a processor that not only tacks on a Vega GPU, but offers the all the enhancements that Zen brought to the table with Ryzen at the start of the year. With an imminent end-of-year launch, ultrabooks powered by Ryzen Mobile are all set to open up a whole new world to productivity-first gamers.