AMD’s 7 nm Ryzen 5000 processors promise the best gaming notebooks from 2021

In its lecture at CES 2021, AMD announced its new Ryzen 5000 mobile CPUs. Most (but not all) of them are based on the company’s 7nm “Zen 3” architecture. AMD CEO Lisa Su called the series “the most powerful PC processors ever built”.

As in the previous generation, the 5000 line has two categories for two very different audiences. There is the H series – which you’ll find on laptops intended for gaming and content creation – and the U series, aimed at ultraportable notebooks. (Three of the U series chips are based on the older Zen 2 architecture, which is a bit annoying.)

Within these categories are the Ryzen 3, Ryzen 5, Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 9 levels (Intel Core i3, Core i5, Core i7 and Core i9 loose counterparts, respectively). The H series maintains the 4000 and H series suffixes, as well as a new HX designation.

The main attraction of the U series is the Ryzen 7 5800U with 16 threads, with clock speeds of 1.9 GHz that can increase up to 4.4 GHz. AMD claims that this chip offers “the fastest productivity in ultra-thin notebooks”. According to the company’s benchmarks, the chip outperforms Intel’s Core i7-1165G7 by a factor of 1.23 in PCMark 10 and outperforms it in a subtest involving various office applications, including Excel and Edge (although the two chips tie in PowerPoint and Intel earn very strictly in Word).

The company also claims that the 5800U can provide up to 17.5 hours of general-purpose battery life and 21 hours of movie playback. This would be very useful, even for AMD, but we will have more accurate estimates as soon as we test the systems.

On the H series side, the big player is the Ryzen 9 5980HS, also with eight cores and 16 threads, but with clock speeds of 3.0 GHz reaching 4.8 GHz. AMD claims that these are “the mobile processors faster than you can get ”. The 5980HS is several steps above the Ryzen 9 4900HS, the monstrous chip that powers Asus’ 2020 Zephyrus G14.

AMD claims the Ryzen 9 5980HS outperforms Intel’s Core i9-10980HK in the Cinebench R20 in single-thread performance (601 to Intel’s 514) and multi-thread performance (4349 for i9’s 3892). It also beats the latest Core i7-1185G7 in both cases.

A novelty in the H series is the HX chips, which AMD says are made for “serious gaming”. AMD says its Ryzen 9 5900HX, at 45W + TDP, will power the “best gaming notebooks of 2021”.

According to the company’s benchmarks, the chip beats Core i9-10980HK on Cinebench R20 (single-thread) by 14 percent, 37 percent on Passmark P10 (measuring overall CPU performance) and 21 percent on 3DMark Fire Strike Physics (which measures graphic performance)

Su expects more than 150 Ryzen 5000 laptops to be launched this year – she expects the first to hit stores in February.

The big question will be how these processors compare to Intel’s new Tiger Lake H systems – the company announced these chips yesterday at its CES 2021 lecture. All three chips (including two Core i7s and one Core i5) reach a maximum of 35W and they have only four cores and eight threads – half the count of Ryzen’s core offerings. However, Intel claims that there is an eight-core processor with speeds up to 5 GHz coming “at the end of this quarter”. That’s probably what AMD needs to be aware of.