CES 2021: AMD Announces Ryzen 5000 Mobile Processors

While light on technical details today’s AMD event revealed that the first notebooks sporting AMD’s latest Ryzen 5000 mobile processors will arrive next month. The new models feature Zen 3 architecture, are unlocked (for those of us who like to do that on our laptops), and “higher thermal design power”.

The Ryzen 5900HX is an 8c/16t part with boost clocks up to 4.6 GHz, 20 MB L2+L3 cache, and a “45W+ TDP”. The faster Ryzen 9 5980HX takes max boost clocks up to 4.8 GHz with the same cache/TDP. The 45W+ TDP seems to indicates max performance requires 54W, based on the previous Ryzen 9 4900H’s 35-54W configurable TDP.

While this might not be the generation for improvements in overall power consumption at max clocks, the Zen 3 architecture as well as higher clocks (the previous-gen Ryzen 9 4900H topped out at 4.4 GHz) will bring faster single-threaded performance, even if multithreaded perf appears to offer modest gains over Ryzen 4000 based on this graph:

AMD is claiming wins against Intel’s Core i9-10980HK in single-threaded performance (Cinebench R20), overall CPU score (Passmark 10), and game physics (3DMark Fire Strike):

This particular comparison pits CPUs with a large disparity in base/boost clock advantages, with Intel offering higher single-core boost frequencies but a much lower base clock. Clearly, AMD has the architectural advantage over Comet Lake, but how these parts compare to upcoming Tiger Lake processors remains to be seen.

Also announced was the Ryzen 7 5800U, an 8c/16t option at 15W TDP, and boost frequencies are up 200 MHz over the previous Ryzen 7 4800U with a max 4.4 GHz. Again, these new Ryzen 5000 Series processors are coming next month (February).