I'd pit them against the i5. Look at the gaming benchmarks, the 1300X is better in some and worse in some other games, but in general on par. While being cheaper and overclockable. I would also be surprised if one could not overclock the 1200 close to the level of the 1500X, and then that $100 cpu will beat the 7400 and be on par with the 7500.
Well, iirc Ryzen 5, gaming performancr got better some time after release, both due to developer optimization processes, and AMD's BIOS updates.
i5s should (and probably will be) ahead of R3, but that's more R5's ballpark.
That's sadly unlikely to happen again for the R3, as it is the same architecture as the R5. It will already profit from the prior optimizations. Maybe some gains where hyperthreading was assumed. I checked some benchmarks more by now and it really seems like your last sentence is right: The i5 is in R5s ballpark, the R3 can't reach it.
We will likely see Zen-based laptops before we see Zen-based standalone APUs, with laptops coming for the holiday season (ie: Oct/Nov) and APUs late 1H18.
I wouldn't mind seeing a good Zen based laptop... Something around an R7 1700 would be nice, maybe 10-20% lower clock for thermals. Something capable of 64gb ram and user serviceable nvme and/or ssd would be great.
There's a decent amount of small form factor Intel stuff on laptop chips (Chromebox, Asus Vivo Mini, etc), if socketed apus aren't forthcoming, that might be something that happens with AMD chips too.
While I absolutely agree and want to see much more competition - I believe we /need/ to see ECC across the board and of course lack of an integrated GPU seems like it renders the most common deployments of this range of CPU less attractive.
