AMD may pack GPU units into Ryzen 9 to keep Intel on edge

(Image credit: Future)

AMD's latest CPUs built on the Zen 2 architecture are ticking a lot of the right boxes, and now the company appears prepared to give its higher-end models a boost.

A number of Ryzen 9 APUs (CPUs paired with GPU cores on the same chip) appear in a leak from @Komachi_Ensaka on Twitter, shared by Notebookcheck. This leak shows a listing of products from AMD, and next to each processor name, there's a designation that appears to indicate graphics cores.

In the case of four Ryzen 9 processors, there appear to be 12 graphical compute units. These are 45W Ryzen 9 and 15W Ryzen 9 Pro models, making them appear to be likely contenders for high-performance mobile computers.

As APUs, they would be ahead of standard CPUs in the naming scheme, thus appearing as Ryzen 4000-series products while still using the Zen 2 architecture found in Ryzen 3000-series CPUs.

A series of mobile strides for AMD

A few powerful Ryzen 9 APUs to feature in mobile devices could further boost AMD's surging strength, and push it even further in mobile.

The company recently got a boost thanks to its prominent placement in Microsoft's recent Surface Laptop 3. However, we tested a Ryzen 5 model with nine Vega compute units, and it just didn't compete with similar laptops that featured simple dedicated graphics solutions.

That could change with the new generation of APUs and the boosted compute unit count, though. The new Ryzen 9 APUs would benefit from the increased efficiency and clockspeeds available thanks to their their 7nm design, and therefore get even more from the integrated Vega graphics compute units.

As Intel's Ice Lake processors push performance and efficiency ahead for Team Blue, and Tiger Lake could take it further, new Ryzen APUs could help AMD stand out with a powerful, all-in-one solution.

Here are the best AMD Ryzen laptops

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Over the last several years, Mark has been tasked as a writer, an editor, and a manager, interacting with published content from all angles. He is intimately familiar with the editorial process from the inception of an article idea, through the iterative process, past publishing, and down the road into performance analysis.