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AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su took to the stage at the virtual CES 2021 to announce new 'Cezanne' Ryzen 5000 Mobile processors that bring the powerful Zen 3 architecture to the notebook market for the first time, opening the door for the company to finally have a larger presence in the highest-end gaming notebooks. That means that we'll finally see AMD's chips paired with the highest-end mobile GPUs when the new Ryzen 5000 Mobile processors come to market in February, which could shake up our Best Gaming Laptops rankings.
AMD says the new chips set the new standard for battery life in x86 notebooks and remain the only 8-core x86 chips for ultrathin laptops. The 13 new processors span from low-power 15W chips up to two new 45W+ HX-series models designed to bring desktop PC-like gaming performance to notebooks. These eight-core HX models carve out a new high-performance niche by bringing CPU, memory, and fabric overclocking to AMD-powered notebooks for the first time.
AMD also expanded its HS series with four flagship chips that slot in with boost clock speeds that stretch up to 4.8 GHz within the 35W TDP envelope. Two new 45W H-series models, which come in both six- and eight-core flavors, are trailed by five U-series processors.
AMD also conducted a demo of its RDNA2 mobile graphics cards that will come to market in the first half of this year. They'll be accompanied by unspecified new RDNA2 cards for the desktop PC. But first, let's take a look at the mobile CPUs.
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The Ryzen 5000 mobile processors all come with threading enabled, higher boost clocks than the previous-gen, and support CPPC (Collaborative Power and Performance Control) technology. This is the same thread-targeting feature present in the Ryzen 3000 and 5000 desktop CPUs, but now it's debuting in AMD-powered laptops. Ultimately, this allows for tighter performance and power control, resulting in higher boost clocks on the fastest cores and extends battery life.
While we have detailed clock speeds and other particulars for the CPU portion of the SoCs, we do know the chips come with the same enhanced 7nm Vega architecture as the previous-gen Ryzen 4000 models (not the company's newest Navi engine). AMD says the units have seen 'double-digit increases' due to higher frequencies, precise clock selection, better power state management, and the increased performance of the Zen 3 CPU cores.
AMD's 7nm Radeon Vega graphics engine touts up to 59% more performance per CU (compute unit) than the first-gen 14nm Vega, which previously allowed the company to use 8 CUs instead of 11. We don't know any other details about the integrated graphics engine, like the graphics clock rates or core (CU) counts for the various SKUs, but AMD says it will share more info in technical briefings as we come closer to the launch next month.
AMD recently chose to unify its Ryzen Mobile branding under the same Ryzen 5000 umbrella as its desktop chips, clearing up the confusion with the Ryzen 4000 series processors that came with an older architecture than desktop Ryzen 3000 models. However, AMD also sprinkled in three Zen 2 chips in the Ryzen 5000 Mobile stack. AMD says this approach meets specific pricing criteria and customer (OEM) demand on the lower end of its product stack. As seen in the second slide, these Zen 2-powered Ryzen 3, 5, and 7 models slot into the lowest-end 15W U-series category, muddying the branding for value seekers.