The first lineup of Ryzen desktop CPU’s was a success for AMD. They offered very good performance for their price, offered competition against Intel CPU’s (which many criticized as being overpriced and stagnant in year-to-year improvement). However, now Intel has stepped up their game with Coffee Lake and the 2nd generation of Ryzen will need to accomplish some of the things it’s first generation didn’t.
These are the areas which I hope AMD can deliver on:
Laptops
Laptops are more prevalent than PC’s nowadays. AMD has some low-mid end APU’s for laptops, but for high-end use of laptops (such as gaming and workstation use), AMD needs an answer to Intel’s laptop i7’s.
Integrated Graphics
One of the biggest weaknesses about Ryzen was its lack of integrated graphics. This is no issue for gaming or workstation builds. However, there are a lot of PC builds out there that aren’t being used for heavily graphical applications (i.e. education, music recording, office work, etc.). Video cards are expensive now, as well, and a number of people want a CPU with integrated graphics until they can get a full-on video card. At the moment, budget builds can buy an Intel i3 or Pentium (for $60-120) and get graphics included. Any Ryzen build will cost more than that for both the CPU and GPU.
Gaming PC’s
Ryzen 3 and 5 were good for budget to mid-range gaming, but the Ryzen 7 was no better for gaming than the Ryzen 5. This is because games care more about clock speeds than amount of cores. Hopefully, AMD is able to increase those clock speeds.
Workstation PC’s
For workstations, Ryzen 7 was the most powerful CPU, with 8 cores instead of 4. However, now that Intel’s current i7’s have 6 cores, they now beat out Ryzen 7.