Over the last year, AMD has started to offer real, genuine competition in both the GPU and CPU space. In 2018, expect a lot more.
AMD has always been good at competing to the low to middle tiers of the CPU and GPU markets, partially thanks to their aggressive pricing and also their range of APU solutions. The release of Ryzen helped push AMD back into middle to top-tier gaming relevance: their chips might not have been the out and out fastest, but they were fast enough, and affordable to the point where Intel responded aggressively of their own.
But something we didn’t see in 2017 was an expanded line of AMD APUs. There were high hopes for AMD chips with Vega technology onboard, but AMD’s decision to focus mainly on the desktop market initially meant 2018 was always going to be the APU’s time in the sun.
AMD unveiled the Ryzen 7 2700U and Ryzen 5 2500U just before Christmas, and in a briefing just before CES they added four more APUs to the list. Two of those are mobile offerings, targeting Intel’s low-end, low-power offerings, and two others are for desktop users.
Ryzen 3 2300U: 4 core, 4 threads / 2.0GHz base clock / 3.4GHz turbo clock
Ryzen 3 2200U: 2 core, 4 threads / 2.5GHz base clock / 3.4GHz turbo clock
Ryzen 3 2200G: 4 core, 4 threads / 3.5GHz base clock / 3.7GHz turbo clock
Ryzen 5 2400G 4 core, 8 threads / 3.6GHz base clock / 3.9GHz turbo clock
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The GPUs in the Ryzen 3 mobile offerings are about equivalent to a NVIDIA GT 1030 – GT, not GTX, which should give you some indication of what ballpark we’re playing in. Mind you, that’s leaps and bounds ahead of your traditional onboard graphics, which is what the Ryzen 3 mobile line is aiming at.
Another fun element is the fact that AMD, according to information presented to journalists at CES, will push out their new Zen+ microarchitecture this year. It’s basically Zen chips running on a 12nm process, instead of the 14nm process last year’s Zen line used. Ryzen CPUs are already pretty power efficient, especially at the low end, and the extra shrinkage is pretty impressive given just how far behind AMD was in the CPU stakes three years ago.
The second-gen Zen CPUs are due to start shipping from April this year, while the desktop Ryzen APUs will be available from February 12. The second generation of AMD’s AM4 chipset, X470, is also due out in April, although existing AM4 motherboards should have no trouble with the new CPUs.
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