Benchmarks for AMD's Zen-based APUs indicate 90% performance gains compared to Bristol Ridge

Combination of Zen and Vega microarchitectures expected to provide radical improvement to laptop performance

Leaked benchmarks for AMD's new APUs - microprocessors with graphics integrated on-die - suggest that the new devices, dubbed Raven Ridge, will outperform its current Bristol Ridge predecessors by as much as 90 per cent.

According to the tech hardware website WCCFTech, scores for the AMD Ryzen 5 2500U indicate that, compared to the current AMD A12-9800B APU, the new device is more than 50 per cent faster in terms of single-core performance, and around 90 per cent faster on multi-core workloads.

The leaked benchmarks for the AMD part shows a score of 3,625 on Geekbench for single-core performance and a score of 9,723 for multi-core. That compares with scores of 2,315 and 5,115, respectively, for an HP Elitebook 745 G4, packing the AMD Pro A12-9800B four-core Bristol Ridge APU.

The Raven Ridge APUs, which AMD is expected to launch in good time for Christmas, will be the first integrated devices featuring a combination of AMD's Zen microarchitecture, which it launched in March this year, and its Vega graphics processing unit (GPU) microarchitecture, which it released this summer.

Information released by AMD earlier this year suggests that the new APUs ought to provide at least a 50 per cent boost to CPU performance while consuming half the power. The new devices are expected to appear first in low-end and mid-range laptops.

Both Zen and Vega are designed to run on a 14nm process architecture, compared to their predecessor technology's 28nm. While Zen, in the form of Ryzen desktop CPUs, have been well received, the reception for Vega has been more muted, with debut devices not providing the big performance leap over rival Nvidia many had expected.

On top of that, AMD's preference for HDM memory over GDDR5 has also added to the cost of graphics cards based on Vega, while bitcoin miners have also snapped up much of the early production, forcing mainstream buyers either to pay a premium for AMD's latest graphics cards - or buy cards by Nvidia instead.