As expected, AMD took the CES stage this week to announce new laptop CPUs. Most of the new Ryzen 5000 mobile chip family shares similarities with the desktop CPUs the company announced a few months ago, and they will start shipping with laptops from some of the biggest computer manufacturers in February.
The new chips are divided into two subfamilies, both at least partly based on 7 nm Zen 3 technology: there is the H series, which is intended for high-end performance and content creation notebooks and games, and the U- series, which aims to dominate Intel in the ultraportable space with a greater focus on energy efficiency.
The biggest elevators in the line are the Ryzen 9 5980HX and 5980HS. The first is a game-oriented chip that will be unlocked for overclocking on some machines. The latter, in turn, is more focused on laptops made for creatives. Both (and all but two of the chips in the Ryzen 5000 phone family) feature eight CPU cores and 16 threads at up to 4.8 Hz.
Here is a chart including the specifications for all the announced chips, from the AMD website:
The U series line also includes 8-core chips, but as you can see, some 6-core chips are also there. Although AMD has made rival Intel’s life difficult on performance-oriented machines, Intel still dominates the ultraportable space (for now), so AMD certainly hopes to achieve some growth there. Up to that point, AMD claims that the 5800U can provide nearly 18 hours of battery life for normal use cases and up to 21 hours for video playback. (Intel also announced its own laptop chips this week.)
On the gaming side, AMD says the 5900HX outperforms Intel’s Core i9-10980HK by more than 20 percent on 3DMark, which certainly seems plausible given what we saw on the desktop side – although it’s clear that it would be wise to wait and see the benchmarks of someone other than AMD.
OEMs have already started announcing laptops with these chips, so we expect to see these illuminating benchmarks as early as next month.