CES 2021 | AMD announces Ryzen 5000 mobile CPUs that will power the best gaming laptops of 2021

Last year, AMD’s Ryzen 5000 desktop CPUs set new performance standards in gaming and content creation. At CES 2021, AMD is bringing that performance to laptops, with its Ryzen 5000 mobile CPUs for gaming and productivity.

Most of the new Ryzen 5000 processors are based on the company’s “Zen 3” architecture, although some U-series models still use older Zen 2 architecture. In reference to the new Ryzen 5000 H series mobile processors, AMD CEO Lisa Su called it, “the most powerful PC processors ever built.”

At the top of AMD’s new Ryzen H series lineup sits the Ryzen 9 5980HX that is equipped with 8 cores and 16 threads, 20MB of L2+L3 cache, and 45W TDP. It features a boost clock speed of up to 4.8GHz and a base clock speed of 3.3 GHz. The other chip to share the HX moniker is the Ryzen 9 5900HX, which features the same specs with a lower 4.6GHz boost clock.

The Ryzen HX processors will power the “2021’s best gaming notebooks”, we’re talking desktop-grade gaming laptops. According to AMD’s benchmarks, the Ryzen 9 5900HX beats Intel’s Core i9-10980HK on Cinebench R20 by 14 percent in single-core performance, 37 percent on Passmark P10’s overall CPU test, and 21 percent on 3DMark Fire Strike Physics.

Heading the regular H and HS series is the Ryzen 5980HS, an 8-core, 16-thread CPU with a base clock of 3.0 GHz and a boost clock of 4.8GHz. AMD claims that these will be “the fastest mobile processors you can get.” AMD compared the Ryzen 9 5980HS to Intel’s Core i9-10980HK and Core i7-1185G7, beating them in Cinebench R20’s single and multi-thread tests.

Lastly, AMD also unveiled new Ryzen 5000 U series processors. The top-of-the-line Ryzen 7 5800U CPU features 8 cores and 16 threads, with 1.9GHz clock speeds that can boost up to 4.4 GHz. AMD also showed benchmarks of the chip beating out the Intel’s Core i7-1165G7 by a factor of 1.23 on PCMark 10. AMD claims that the Ryzen 7 5800U will deliver “the fastest productivity in ultrathin notebooks.”

AMD also claims that the Ryzen 7 5800U will offer up to 17.5 hours of battery life in general use and up to 21 hours of movie playback. This entails a major performance boost for future ultrabooks. AMD CEO Lisa Su expects over 150 Ryzen 5000 laptops to launch this year, the first of which will arrive next month.