AMD Ryzen 7 250 vs AMD Ryzen Z2

AMD Ryzen 7 250

The AMD Ryzen 7 250 is a powerful laptop processor (APU) of the now years-old Hawk Point family that was announced at CES 2025. This isn't an entirely new APU; instead, the R7 250 is a rebadged R7 8840U. Its eight Zen 4 cores run at 3.3 GHz to 5.1 GHz and are SMT-enabled for a total of 16 processing threads. The Radeon 780M iGPU is responsible for 3D processing and similar duties.

Architecture and Features

Hawk Point family chips are powered by the Zen 4 architecture, much like Phoenix and Dragon Range family chips were. The 16 TOPS NPU present here isn't powerful enough for systems built around the 7 250 to be Copilot+ certified.

Elsewhere, the chip has 16 MB of L3 cache and support for super-fast DDR5-5600 and LPDDR5x-7500 RAM while also being compatible with USB 4 and thus with Thunderbolt. It comes with 20 PCIe 4 lanes, giving fast NVMe SSD up to 7.8 GB/s of throughput.

Please note that this processor is not overclockable and neither is it user-replaceable. It gets soldered to the motherboard for good instead (FP8 socket interface).

Performance

Since the R7 250 is an 8840U / 7840U in disguise, it's safe to expect it to be about as fast as the Intel Core Ultra 7 256V in multi-thread workloads. Therefore, the CPU performance is good enough even for demanding tasks, as of 2025.

Your mileage may vary depending on how high the CPU power limits are and how competent the cooling solution of your system is.

Graphics

The Radeon 780M has 12 CUs (768 shaders) purring away at up to 2,700 MHz. The Radeon will let you use up to 4 monitors with resolutions as high as SUHD 4320p and it will also HW-decode and HW-encode the most widely used video codecs (such as AV1, HEVC and AVC) without breaking a sweat. As for gaming, most 2024 games run fine at 1080p with settings set to Low on this graphics adapter.

Your mileage may vary depending on how high the CPU power limits are, how competent the cooling solution of your system is, how fast the RAM of your system is (there is no dedicated VRAM here).

Power consumption

This Ryzen 7 series chip has a long-term power limit (default TDP) of 28 W. Laptop makers are free to change that value significantly, with values as low as 15 W and as high as 30 W greenlighted by AMD. Either way, an active cooling solution is a must for any system powered by this chip.

The R7 250 is built with TSMC's 4 nm process for high, as of late 2023, energy efficiency.

AMD Ryzen Z2

The Ryzen Z2 Extreme is a powerful handheld processor (APU) of the Hawk Point family. It is based on the old Ryzen 7 7840U / 8840U but without the Ryzen AI engine. Its eight Zen 4 cores run at 3.3 GHz to 5.1 GHz and are SMT-enabled for a total of 16 processing threads. 

Architecture & Features

Hawk Point family chips are powered by the Zen 4 architecture, much like Phoenix and Dragon Range family chips are. That's not to say there is no difference between the three. With Hawk Point, AMD is betting big on generative AI; these chips are promised to deliver an up to 40% increase in generative AI performance over 7040 series APUs making apps like DaVinci Resolve and Adobe Photoshop more powerful than ever before.

Unlike Zen 3, Zen 4 features AVX512 support and, thanks to a plethora of other improvements including larger caches/registers/buffers across the board, is slated to deliver a double-digit IPC improvement over the former.

Elsewhere, the 8840U has 16 MB of L3 cache and support for super-fast DDR5-5600 and LPDDR5x-7500 RAM. The chip is compatible with USB 4 and thus with Thunderbolt. It comes with 20 PCIe 4 lanes, giving fast NVMe SSD up to 7.8 GB/s of throughput.

Performance

Since the Z2 Extreme is a 8840U / 7840U in disguise, it's safe to expect it to be about as fast as the Core i7-12650H, as far as multi-thread performance is concerned. 

Graphics

The Radeon 780M has 12 CUs (768 shaders) at a currently not known clock frequency (most likely reduced compared to the Ryzen 7). 

Power consumption

This Ryzen 7 series chip has a long-term power limit (default TDP) of 28 W (configurable from 15 - 30 Watt). 

The Z2 Extreme is built with TSMC's 4 nm process..