AMD Ryzen Mobile To Marry Zen With Vega For Big Performance Gains
AMD made a flurry of announcements this evening during its Financial Analyst Day presentation, one of which includes new mobile solutions that pairs the company's Ryzen CPU architecture with its forthcoming Vega GPU architecture. Or put another way, AMD is readying its first Zen-based mobile APU (accelerated processing unit) with on-die Vega graphics, both for desktops and laptops.
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We're still in the process of gathering information, but here is what we know so far. Compared to AMD's 7th generation APUs, Ryzen Mobile will up the CPU performance ante by 50 percent while offering 40 percent better graphics performance. Those gains will not come at the expense of battery life, either—AMD is claiming a 50 percent reduction in power consumption, which will pave the way for faster, longer lasting premium notebooks and 2-in-1 devices.
This ties in with AMD's mission to shed its reputation as almost exclusively serving the value and entry-level markets with lower power solutions. Just as we saw with Ryzen and soon with Vega, AMD is in attack mode at the high end of the performance spectrum, and that strategy is spilling over into other markets, not just enthusiast desktops.
AMD will also roll out variant of Ryzen Mobile for commercial clients called Ryzen Mobile Pro. What separates these chips from the regular Ryzen Mobile parts are remote management and security features. While AMD did not go into great detail here, we assume these will be competitive with Intel's vPro line.
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Also of interest to professionals, AMD announced Ryzen Pro, a new line of workstation-class processors for video creation, 3D rendering, and other related chores. AMD describes these processors as its "dedicated offering for the commercial market."
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Ryzen Pro will ship first to commercial desktops in the second half of this year, followed by a roll out to mobile workstations in the first half of 2018.
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As to AMD's other Ryzen parts, Ryzen Mobile is slated to ship in consumer laptops by the end of the year, with Ryzen Mobile Pro solutions being offered in commercial notebooks in the first half of next year.
In case it is not obvious, AMD has planted the seeds for growth with Ryzen and Vega. We already know that Ryzen lives up to the hype, and assuming Vega does the same on the graphics side of the equation, AMD will finally be in good shape give Intel a run for its money in multiple market segments, including high performance categories. That is not something AMD has been able to do for many years.
