AMD kicked off its CES 2021 keynote by talking about the work its powerful processors have been able to get done. Soon, that power will be available to consumers on the go. AMD has revealed a new line of Zen 3 powered mobile processors within the Ryzen 5000 Series.
These new Ryzen 5000 Series mobile processors will be the most powerful on the market, at least, according to AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su. The processors will continue using a 7nm process, promise long battery life for x86 laptops, and will be the only eight-core x86 CPUs available for ultrathin laptops. From Dr. Su’s presentation, it seems that these processors are being built for thin and light laptops rather than bulky, high-end gaming laptops.
To demonstrate the power of these new processors, Dr. Su brought out comparisons of its top of the line against Intel’s. Named the Ryzen 7 5800U, this chip comes with eight cores, 16 threads, and a max boost clock of 4.4 GHz. According to AMD’s metrics, the 5800U crushes Intel’s Core i7 1185G7 across multiple use cases, including content creation, video encoding, office application, and design and visualization performance.
Doubling back onto the topic of battery life, Dr. Su pointed out how long consumers can expect to use their machines with a mobile 5000 Series chip. Apparently, a laptop sporting the Ryzen 7 5800U will get up to 17.5 hours of general use or 21 hours of movie playback before powering down. However, these statistics were extremely vague. At no point was an overall battery size mentioned, nor was life expectancy while gaming.
New mobile processors just for gaming
AMD isn’t leaving all its processing eggs in one basket. The company introduced a second line of mobile processors in the same show, the H Series. These processors are apparently made for gaming. Utilizing the same Zen 3 architecture as other modern Ryzen chips, the H Series will also feature a higher thermal tolerance and overclocking capabilities. The two top of the line H processors AMD has lined up are the Ryzen 9 5900HX and Ryzen 9 5980HX. Both feature eight cores and 16 threads, a 20 MB cache, and 45W TDP. The 5900 HX is just slightly weaker than the 5980HX though, boosting up to 4.6GHz and 4.8 GHz respectively.
These are the processors that consumers should expect to find in high-end gaming laptops. To demonstrate the power of these processors, AMD presented footage of Horizon Zero Dawn running at high settings at over 100 fps on the 5900HX.
As for when consumers can expect to get their hands on thin and light notebooks or heavy-duty gaming laptops sporting these chips, the wait won’t be long. According to Dr. Su, the first notebooks sporting Ryzen 5000 mobile processors will hit the market just next month, in February. At this point, it’s up to OEMs to announce the products they have lined up sporting these new mobile Zen 3 AMD processors.
