AMD Raven Ridge rumors: leaked bencharks unmask interesting comparison with NVIDIA MX150

Screengrab from AMD's promotional video for RyzenYouTube/AMD

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is bringing the power of Ryzen to people's laps, as the new "Raven Ridge" Ryzen mobile central processing units (CPU) just got their benchmarks leaked.

Hot on the heels of the Hewlett-Packard's (HP) announcement for their new Raven Ridge powered laptops, performance data for the AMD Ryzen 7 2700U and Ryzen 5 2500U were leaked online. The "U" branding on the model names of both CPUs indicate that they are low-powered designs, similar to Intel's model names for its laptop CPUs. This means that they are not as powerful as their desktop counterparts.

The design of the two Raven Ridge CPUs is also based on the Zen core architecture of AMD, which started with the Ryzen series of CPUs. The difference is that the Raven Ridge mobile CPUs also come bundled with AMD Radeon Vega mobile graphics on its die.

The benchmarks were done on the 3DMark11 synthetic CPU and graphics processing unit GPU performance software, with the stronger Ryzen 7 2700U scoring a 6419 on Physics and its mobile Radeon Vega chip scoring 4072 on Graphics. This was still comparably lower than Intel's Core i5-8550U and MX150 GPU, which scored 8278 and 4570 on the Physics and Graphics, respectively. Oddly enough, while the Graphics score of Ryzen 5 2500U is lower (3655) than the Ryzen 7, its Physics score it notably higher (6595) but still not enough to beat Intel.

While this is not much of a contender for Intel in terms of raw performance, WCCF Tech suggests that if the Raven Ridge CPUs manage to stay at a thermal design power (TDP) of 35 watts, then it will be a strong competitor against the much more expensive Intel and MX150 configurations for laptops. This is because Intel's mobile CPU bundled with NVIDIA yields a TDP of 40 watts.

It is worth noting that the benchmarks leaked were only for 3DMark11 that utilized a DirectX 11 application program interface (API), which means that the results might be vastly different when a DirectX 12 API is utilized for the benchmark since AMD Radeon has had a clear advantage on DirectX 12. Also, other synthetic benchmarks may still provide diverse results compared to 3DMark11.

People who have been wanting to purchase a new laptop may still want to wait until further benchmarks are released.