Traditionally AMD's APUs haven't been particularly strong at anything. They featured a weaker version of the company's mainstream CPUs, combined with a weak version of its graphics chips. That wasn't necessarily any different with the recent range of Raven Ridge APUs, but what did change was the performance. Thanks to powerful Ryzen central processing and decent graphical performance from the Vega core, the 2200G and 2400G were capable little gaming chips. Their successors, the Picasso lineup could offer much the same but with Zen 2 improvements.
The Picasso APU first showed up on the User Benchmark database without any performance numbers to hint at how capable it is. However, what we can draw from it and more recent leaks, is that it will be a 12nm part, so will be based on the current-generation Zen+ architecture, rather than the upcoming 7nm Zen 2 refresh. That might mean it doesn't see quite the same performance leap as the mainstream Matisse CPU releases and effectively makes Picasso its own range of chips (thanks WCCFTech).
That would be similar in many ways to the existing Raven Ridge APUs though, which are a unique blend of Ryzen CPU and Vega core that fall behind their mainstream counterparts in both CPU and GPU segments but offer something in the middle ground of both. Picasso will likely be much the same, with increased clock speeds and efficiency boosts over all existing AMD APUs.
Stay tuned for more details as they come in later this year.
