From The Verge: Over the last year, one of the more interesting stories has been AMD’s resurgence to relevance as a viable alternative to Intel. AMD’s new Ryzen chips have managed to at least offer a credible challenge to Intel’s dominance in almost every facet of the desktop PC world, from high-end, multi-core processors like the Threadripper line to the budget Ryzen 3.
But now AMD is setting its sights even higher, toward laptops — arguably the most important segment of the computer category, and one where Intel’s lines of Core i3, i5, and i7 chips have long reigned virtually uncontested by AMD. To that end, the company is unveiling its first two laptop processors from the Ryzen line: the Ryzen 5 2500U and the Ryzen 7 2700U, designed for ultrathin laptops.
As the company teased in May, the two Ryzen laptop chips are technically APUs, or “accelerated processing units,” which combine a CPU and an integrated GPU into a single chip. In the case of the Ryzen 5 2500U and the Ryzen 7 2700U, that’s a Ryzen CPU with a Radeon Vega GPU, and represents one of AMD’s key advantages here — unlike Intel, which has to rely on partners like Nvidia to provide high-end graphical capabilities, AMD is able to leverage its own GPU experience from the Radeon line in its integrated chips. That said, Intel does produce its own integrated graphics on its chips too, through the Iris and Intel HD Graphics lines, although AMD claims that its existing experience gives it an edge here.
Both processors are 15W chips and offer four cores and eight threads. The Ryzen 5 2500U is clocked at a base speed of 2.0GHz (which can be boosted to 3.6GHz), with the Ryzen 7 2700U coming in at a base speed of 2.2GHz (which can be boosted to 3.8GHz). On the GPU side, the 2500U offers eight Radeon Vega compute units (CUs) and is clocked at up to 1100MHz, while the 2700U offers 10 Vega CUs clocked at up to 1300MHz.
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