AMD is taking the Zen 3 technology in Ryzen 5000 desktop CPUs and bringing it to laptops.
At CES, the company introduced the first Ryzen 5000 mobile CPUs, which will arrive in laptops as soon as February. The new processors will come in four classes:
- The HX-series is focused on elite performance, using a TDP at over 45 watts.
- The HS-series takes the TDP down to 35 watts to power thin and light designs.
- A notch below the HX is the H-series, which has a TDP at 45 watts.
- And then there's the U-series, which prioritizes both performance and efficiency, such as battery life. However, these chips have the lowest clock speeds.
All fours classes can scale up to CPUs with 8 cores and 16 threads.
With the HX-series, AMD is targeting PC gamers looking for the most powerful laptops. "Gamers actually want desktop-like performance in a notebook-like form factor. And that's exactly what we built," says AMD CEO Lisa Su.
The two CPUs in the HX series include the Ryzen 9 5900X, which has a 4.6GHz boost clock speed, and the Ryzen 9 5980 HX, which takes it up another notch to 4.8GHz. Both processors use 8 cores, 16 threads, and are unlocked for overclocking.
To demonstrate the performance, the company benchmarked the 5900X against Intel’s Core i9-10980HK chip, a leading gaming laptop processor with 8 cores. According to AMD, the 5900X beats Intel’s silicon by 13% in single-threaded computing and by 35% when it comes to overall performance.
AMD also talked up the most powerful CPU in the U-series, the Ryzen 7 5800U, which has 8 cores and 16 threads. The chip has a lower boost clock speed at 4.4GHz. Nevertheless, Su calls it the "fastest x86 processor in the world for thin and light notebooks."
AMD benchmarked it against Intel’s competing “Tiger Lake” Core i7-1185G7 chip, and the results show AMD’s processor posting a 7% to 44% performance increase, depending on the task.
With the 5800U, the company is also promising long battery life for laptops. AMD says the chip can offer a system up to 17.5 hours of general usage on a single charge and up to 21 hours for video playback.
The processors will first arrive in laptop models from Asus, HP, and Lenovo. The company expects the Ryzen 5000 mobile CPUs to end up in over 150 consumer and commercial laptops models, a 50% increase over the last-generation Ryzen 4000 mobile chips. As a result, the new silicon may pose a serious competitive threat to Intel’s hold over the laptop space.
Here's a list of all the 13 chip variants that'll be released. However, it's important to note the lowest CPUs on the list, the 5500U and 5300U, actually don't use the Zen 3 architecture but the older Zen 2 technology.
During its CES presentation, AMD said it’s preparing to bring the company’s RDNA2 graphics architecture to laptops as well. Expect the discrete graphics to begin arriving in notebook models during the first half of 2021.