AMD Expands Zen 3 on Laptops at CES 2021

AMD’s CEO, Dr. Lisa Su, was back this year presenting the company’s CES 2021 lecture, which the entire industry has watched closely. 2020 was an excellent year for AMD, and it started at CES 2020 with the announcement of the Ryzen 4000 series on laptops. Although AMD did not fully report on 2020’s finances, expectations are high for AMD’s fourth quarter and full year 2020 results. The company made a significant turnaround in both the consumer CPU and the company and significant progress in the GPU. AMD is now in a leadership position in desktop CPU, which the company hasn’t had in over a decade, and the industry hoped that would reach laptops.

AMD traditionally uses CES to launch its latest generation of laptop CPUs and this year was no different with the launch of the Ryzen 5000 series of mobile processors. The Ryzen 5000 processor series is the fastest that the company has ever launched on the market and features three different performance levels: low-power U-series processors, high-performance H-series processors and high-performance HX-series game processors . However, there is one thing about the Ryzen 5000 series that some may not know, not all AMD Ryzen 5000 series have Zen 3 architecture. Only the Ryzen 5 5600U and Ryzen 7 5800U are Zen 3, which benefit from a Higher IPC, higher clock speed and more shared cache.

The Ryzen 5000 HX series of notebook processors from AMD currently consists of two processors, the Ryzen 9 5900HX and Ryzen 9 5980HX. Both CPUs have eight core designs with 20MB of L2 and L3 cache and increase 4.6 and 4.8 GHz. These chips have a 45W + TDP, which we assume to mean 45W most of the time, except in specific scenarios , but at the moment we don’t know what that means entirely, except for these very high-performance processors. These are the processors you would expect to see AMD put to compete with the latest 11^º Generation game processors I spoke to earlier this week Several OEMs have already committed to using these chips in their gaming laptops, including Acer and ASUS.

As a whole, I think AMD’s overall laptop lineup has become more complete and attractive to OEMs and consumers, which is why AMD has been able to continually increase the company’s overall laptop design wins year after year. In fact, in just two years, AMD was able to double its overall mobile design wins from 70 systems with the Ryzen 3000 series to 150 mobile systems with the Ryzen 5000 series. This shows that OEMs are adopting AMD CPUs on both desktops and on mobile devices in a way they’ve never done before. In fact, Lisa Su had the CEOs of HP and Lenovo, as well as Microsoft’s Panos Panay ‘on stage’ to talk about her relationships with the company, which shows the support of the biggest players in the industry. AMD will have to overcome Intel’s brand of experience approach with Evo and vPro for maximum levels of success. I think AMD will also have to find a way to deal with Intel’s unmasking of its battery-powered performance and “RUGs” (Representative usage guides).

Overall, AMD showed this CES that the company’s momentum is only gaining momentum in the mobile market and that the Zen 3 architecture is showing strength from low-power mobile devices to high-performance computing. Last year’s CES was a showcase of what AMD was able to accomplish in its return to competition, and this year’s CES was a victory lap to show just how far the company has really gone. I hope to see more of AMD ahead of the GPU later this year and whether the overall momentum of the company can help it overcome some challenges ahead of the GPU, although I believe the RDNA 2 and 6800 XT architecture have shown significant promise.

Note: Moor Insights & Strategy senior analyst Anshel Sag contributed to this note.

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