At CES 2022, AMD has announced its newest generation of mobile processors, the Ryzen 6000 series, the company’s latest effort to beat Intel and Apple for the best laptop chips. Code-named "Rembrandt" on roadmaps during development, the processors will start arriving in laptops this February, with AMD touting even faster performance and better power efficiency than last year’s Ryzen 5000 series for laptops.
The most powerful chips in the Ryzen 6000 series can now hit 5GHz in boost clock speeds. Notebooks built around the processors can also last up to 24 hours on a single charge, according to AMD.
Harnessing the Power of 6nm
To build the chips, the company is tapping TSMC’s 6-nanometer (6nm) manufacturing process, which can pack more transistors onto the silicon than previous processes. As a result, the Ryzen 6000 series can deliver, on average, “1.3x” faster performance over the 7nm Ryzen 5000 series.
According to the company’s benchmark-test claims, the performance gains are modest on single-threaded tasks. But the enhancements become more pronounced on multi-threaded and graphics-related processing.
In addition, the Ryzen 6000 series uses a new CPU architecture called “Zen 3+,” which has been specifically designed for laptops and comes with 50 new and enhanced power-management features, such as improved sleep states. Along with better battery life, the improvements can pave the way for reduced fan noise and a cooler system.
“With that incredible performance, we’re still able to deliver up to 24 hours of battery life in video playback, which is an enormous step up from where we were last year,” said David McAfee, AMD Corporate Vice President, in a press briefing. “Zen 3+ is really all about power.”
RDNA 2 Gets on the Chip
The other major change to the Ryzen 6000 series is the built-in graphics processing silicon. The company has integrated its RDNA 2 graphics architecture directly on the die to boost the chips’ processing power for video rendering and graphics-related tasks. This is an AMD first, replacing the now venerable, but still very serviceable, Radeon RX Vega integrated graphics processors (IGPs) that AMD has used for its on-chip graphics for many years now. (See our 2021 study of laptop integrated graphics performance.)
That means, in theory, you can game using the processors' integrated silicon alone, without a pricey graphics card. The built-in GPU can span up to 12 compute units, depending on the chip in question, and it’s designed to even support ray-tracing on PC games. Just don’t expect top-tier performance. AMD’s benchmarks suggest the gaming will have to be limited to low graphics settings at 1080p to reach respectable frame rates.
Nevertheless, the new chips promise to perform two times better on games than on last year’s Ryzen 5000 laptop processors and their IGPs. The chips can also get a gaming boost by tapping AMD’s supersampling technology, FidelityFX, which can improve the frame rates even further, past 60 frames per second, on certain games.
Breaking Down Rembrandt: Here's the Chips
The Ryzen 6000 series will span 20 different chip versions, according to AMD's CES keynote. But for now, the company is revealing specs for only 10 chip models, which will feature either six cores and 12 threads, or eight cores and 16 threads.
AMD uses the same designations for its mobile CPUs (H and U) that Intel does to distinguish its own. Eight of the newly announced chips, dubbed the H-Series, will focus on more powerful laptops meant for gamers and digital content creators. The other two, part of the U-Series, will be devoted to thin-and-light laptop designs.
Other notable improvements to the Ryzen 6000 chips include support for DDR5 RAM, Wi-Fi 6E, HDMI 2.1 and USB 4. Expect laptop makers including Asus, Alienware, HP, Lenovo and Razer to adopt the new processors in upcoming product refreshes.
However, AMD’s presentation largely refrained from benchmarking the processors against Intel’s or Apple’s competing laptop processors. So stay tuned for our reviews of the first Ryzen 6000-based laptops, which is when we can really put the Ryzen 6000 series to the test versus the field. And that might be quite the field: Over 200 laptop designs are expected to the use new chips this year, according to AMD.