AMD Expands Lineup of Mobile Ryzen, Vega Chips

From PC Mag: AMD made waves last year with its powerful Ryzen 5, Ryzen 7, and Ryzen Threadripper CPUs designed for high-end desktops, offering comparable performance to Intel's best processors at equivalent or lower prices. But the company appears to want to shake up the entire market for business and consumer laptops, so it's also introducing CPUs for workstations as well as the Chromebooks and cheap 2-in-1 convertibles that are now a staple of Best Buy aisles.

The complete Ryzen mobile lineup, unveiled on Sunday ahead of CES, includes two new low-end Ryzen 3 U-series processors, along with the previously announced Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 mobile chips. The Ryzen 3 2300U has four cores and a max clock speed of 3.4GHz, while the Ryzen 3 2200U is nearly identical but with two cores.

All of the U-series models are paired with integrated Vega graphics cards, but more interesting to power users is AMD's unveiling of the first discrete GPUs for laptops based on the Vega architecture. Current Vega GPUs for desktops are designed to compete with Nvidia's 10-series GPUs, but they have much higher power requirements, leading to awkward solutions like the giant power brick included with the Dell Inspiron 27 2770.

AMD offered few details about the discrete mobile Vega models, other than that they'll be arriving in gaming laptops sometime this year. So far any AMD-powered laptops have been scarce, limited mainly to a single model each from HP, Lenovo, and Acer. But at least Acer appears ready to experiment: It announced a version of the Nitro 5 entry-level gaming laptop last week that has a new AMD Radeon RX560 GPU, so perhaps that's a harbinger of a Vega-powered model on the horizon.

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