AMD held its annual Financial Analyst Day web conference on May 16, and the firm announced a number of new products that PC enthusiasts have been eagerly awaiting. While we did not get information on the full lineup and release dates for the highly anticipated Vega generation of AMD GPUs, we did learn about some interesting products that provide of glimpse of where the company is headed.
One such product involves new mobile solutions, namely those based on the new Zen architecture and Ryzen CPUs. AMD introduced the Ryzen Mobile APU line of chipsets that will mate Vega graphics with Ryzen CPUs to make for competitive new mobile options for notebook makers, according to Techreport.
The news came via AMD Jim Anderson, and the new chipsets appear to offer solid performance improvements over the company’s current A-Series APU. In terms of CPU performance, Ryzen Mobile APUs promise a 50-percent improvement in processor performance along with a 40-percent improvement in graphics performance.
In addition, AMD is projecting a 50-percent reduction in power usage even given those significant performance increases. That means that Ryzen Mobile APUs could make their way into the market’s thin and lightweight ultraportable notebooks and 2-in-1 machines. AMD should, therefore, pose some serious competition to both Intel’s mobile CPUs and integrated GPUs, and Nvidia mobile GPU options.
AMD did not provide too many details on the new Ryzen Mobile APUs. We don’t know the pricing yet, and the only availability information that we have at this point indicates that Ryzen Mobile APU-equipped notebooks should make their way to the market sometime during the second half of 2017, whereas commercial machines will not see the new chipsets until the first half of 2018.
AMD is holding its next major press event at Computex, where many are expecting more specifics on Vega. It is entirely possible that we will learn more about the Ryzen Mobile APUs during this event or otherwise during Computex, but if not, then we still will not have to wait too long to see notebooks with another solid performance option.
