Ever since their arrival in March of this year, AMD's Ryzen desktop CPUs have proven themselves compelling alternatives to Intel's chips at nearly every common price point. Ryzen CPUs generally bring more cores and threads to the table than equivalently-priced Intel CPUs, and recent sales have made it easier than ever to get gobs of multithreaded computing power for less.

Intel's latest Coffee Lake CPUs have closed the multithreaded performance gap in much of our testing, but the company's continued insistence on careful feature segmentation and the spotty availability of Coffee Lake parts in general has made the blue team's next-gen broadside less damaging to the resurgent AMD than one might expect so far.

AMD's renewed competitiveness in the enthusiast desktop is a border skirmish compared to the war it's getting ready to wage in the mobile-CPU marketplace. Most PCs sold these days are laptops of some kind, and AMD's Ryzen Mobile chips are its latest in a long line of "accelerated processing units": CPU cores with a powerful on-die Radeon graphics processor. For the first time since the advent of the APU, AMD has both competitive CPU cores and a cutting-edge graphics-processing unit that it can bring together. With four Zen CPU cores and eight threads, plus as many as 640 Radeon Vega compute units, the Ryzen 5 2500U and Ryzen 7 2700U stuff a ton of potential computing horsepower into their 15W TDPs.