ASUS ROG Just Teased Its Ryzen Gaming Notebook Ahead Of Computex

Earlier this week AMD talked about its mobile strategy with regards to Ryzen and said that we can expect a variety of Zen-powered laptops starting in the third quarter of this year. Picking up where AMD left off, ASUS and its Republic of Gamers division posted a teaser video giving us a shadowed look at what will presumably be its first gaming laptop with Ryzen inside.

The video is short on details, but big on hype. It shows a laptop with the ROG logo on the lid, with the Ryzen logo serving as the backdrop. As the logo and laptop come into partial view, the words "Something has awakened" get scribbled underneath. And in the video's description on YouTube, ASUS writes, "Something BIG is coming your way! Can you guess what it is? #JointheRepublic #Computex2017." So obviously this laptop will be unveiled at Computex at the end of the month.


It will be interesting to see which of AMD's Ryzen processors end up in this thing. During its Financial Day Analyst event this past Tuesday, AMD talked about Ryzen Mobile, its next-generation accelerated processing unit (APU) that pairs its Zen CPU architecture with its forthcoming Vega GPU architecture. While that's a possible contender, and perhaps even the most likely scenario, it is not a foregone conclusion.

That leaves the question of what will ASUS equip its first Ryzen-based gaming laptop with if not a Ryzen Mobile APU, and the answer is, it could be anything. Given that AMD is expected to unveil consumer variants of Vega at Computex, it is entirely possible that ASUS will pair an not-yet-announced mobile version of Ryzen with Vega. It could also use a desktop chip, though ASUS hasn't been known to go that route.

AMD claims its Ryzen Mobile APUs are 50 percent faster than the previous generation APUs, while offering 40 percent more graphics performance and consuming 50 percent less power. That said, it would be surprising to us if ASUS leaned entirely on AMD's on-die graphics for a Republic of Gamers laptop rather than a discrete GPU.