AMD lists the new Ryzen 7 2800H and Ryzen 5 2600H mobile CPUs

AMD has been knocking it out of the park in the desktop space. Ryzen, the CPU architecture AMD introduced in 2017, was a much-needed jumpstart for the chip manufacturer. However, AMD hasn’t seen the same success in the laptop market. After showing initial promise by integrating its desktop CPUs in a few select notebooks, the company hasn’t pushed too hard into the mobile arena. That may change soon; AMD recently listed the Ryzen 5 2600H and Ryzen 7 2800H. These two new CPUs look like successors of the Ryzen U-series CPUs we saw earlier this year.

The Ryzen 7 2800H looks like an update to the Ryzen 7 2700U, and the Ryzen 5 2600H replaces the Ryzen 5 2500U. Perhaps the biggest upgrade in the new H-series SoCs is support for DDR4-3200 RAM; the earlier U-series CPUs only supported speeds up to 2400 MHz. Both chips have also bumped the base clock speed of the SoCs they’ll replace. The 2600H is clocked at 3.3/3.6 GHz (base/boost), a sizeable bump over the 2500U’s 2.0/3.6 GHz clock. The 2800H echoes this, bumping the base clock from 2.2 GHz to 3.4 GHz. The 2800H’s boost clock is 3.8 GHz, the same as the 2700U’s.

Otherwise, the new chips are virtually unchanged. Both have the same size L3 cache (4 MB) as their predecessors. The Ryzen 5 2600H carries over the same Radeon RX Vega 8 GPU from the 2500U, but the Ryzen 7 2800H will use a Radeon RX Vega 11, a slight improvement over the 2700U’s Vega 10. The TDP for both new chips is configurable between 35 and 54 Watts with a 45 W nominal TDP. This is a sizeable bump over the U-series’ 12-25 W TDP (15 W nominal), which means that the H-series SoCs are likely destined for gaming laptops rather than thin-and-lights.

The new H-series CPUs have only just been listed without any official announcement. As such, there’s no word on pricing or a release date.

AMD’s strategy has to be questioned. The H-series Ryzen CPUs looked designed for gaming laptops. However, Intel’s 8th gen CPUs, which are already widely used in gaming notebooks, feature six-core/12-thread designs and should handily beat AMD’s options. The on-board Vega GPUs also won’t be of much use in a gaming laptop; the Radeon RX Vega 11 is about on par with Nvidia’s MX150, a GPU designed for thin-and-light machines. Even the relatively inexpensive GTX 1050 destroys the Vega 11 in gaming benchmarks. As such, OEMs will want to put a dedicated GPU in their Ryzen laptops to make them competitive. We’ll see how well these new SoCs fare when we get them in for review.

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