Asus ROG released a teaser video, titled "Something Has Awakened," of its first Zen-based laptop. AMD's recent 2017 financial analyst day served up a cornucopia of news. From 32C/64T EPYC server processors to the forthcoming 16C/32T Threadripper CPUs for the HEDT, it seems that AMD has a solution for every processor market segment. AMD also announced that its forthcoming Zen-based APUs, previously named "Raven Ridge" but now branded as "Ryzen Mobile," will sport on-die Vega graphics. We should expect those to come to market for the consumer market in 2H17 and the commercial market in 1H18.
Asus' video, posted to its Republic of Gamers YouTube channel, has absolutely no technical detail and merely shows an image of the new unnamed laptop.
Given ROG's high-performance slant, we expect this to be a gaming laptop. We also aren't sure if the laptop will have a separate graphics card or merely rely upon the on-die Vega GPU. We do know a few details, though, of AMD's performance expectations for the Ryzen APUs.
AMD's internal estimates indicate the new consumer lineup will feature up to 50% more CPU performance than previous-generation products and bring 40% more graphics horsepower to the table, as well. Most importantly for the mobile segment, AMD also projects a 50% reduction in power consumption, and much of that improvement is likely borne on the back of the new 14nm process and AMD's Pure Power functionality.
The commercial Ryzen Pro SKUs will feature up to 31% more Passmark performance and 17% more rendering performance in Blender workloads. AMD also expects video creation workloads to benefit, with an additional 33% performance bump in Adobe Premiere Pro exports.
AMD has a robust processor rollout schedule, with Ryzen 3, Ryzen Pro, and Ryzen Mobile products rolling out in the coming months. We expect to see the leading-edge motherboards and laptops emerge at Computex next week.
