AMD has entered 2019 with its arms swinging, at least on the best CPU for gaming side of the fight. It won't be long before the company launches its 7-nanometer Zen 2 lineup for the desktop—it recently showed off a 64-core Zen 2 server CPU—though in the meantime, it's trotting out a new round of mobile Ryzen processors with Vega graphics.
In the old days, we'd call these APUs (accelerated processing units). AMD doesn't use that term anymore, but that's essentially what these new Ryzen 3000 series mobile processors are.
The new chips are built on a 12nm manufacturing process. They're intended for ultrathin laptops and gaming notebooks, the latter of which is where the Vega graphics come into play. Performance will vary by model, obviously, with AMD's new chips offering anywhere from three to 10 Vega CPU cores.
Here's a handy cheat sheet of the specs:
We wouldn't expect much gaming grunt from the lower tier chips, though the Ryzen 5 3500U and above should be to handle less demanding games, depending on the resolution and image settings.
Specifically, AMD is promoting the ability to game at 1280x720 in games like Fortnite, with better framerates than what you could get from comparable Intel chips. At the higher end of the product stack, here's a look at AMD's internal benchmarking figures:
The comparisons to Intel don't stop at gaming. According to AMD, its Ryzen 7 3700U can edit media up to 29 percent faster than Intel's Core i7-8550U. What will really blow your mind, though, is that AMD says its Ryzen 5 3500U can load websites up to 14 percent faster than the Core i5-8250U! Just imagine how much more web surfing you'll get done!
Okay, maybe that's not really a mic-drop moment. What could be is pricing, depending on how things shake out. AMD says new notebooks featuring its latest mobile chips will start to arrive this quarter. In addition, AMD has committed to delivering "regular" Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition driver updates for all processor with Radeon graphics.
In other mobile news, AMD also launched a couple of new A-series processors, the A6-9220 (2C/2T, 1.8GHz to 2.7GHz, 1MB L2 cache) and A4-9120 (2C/2T, 1.6GHz to 2.4GHz, 1MB L2 cache) with integrated Radeon graphics. These will be AMD's first mobile processors to end up in Chromebooks, if that's your thing.
