AMD presents the Ryzen 5000 series with Zen 3 for laptops

When AMD holds a press conference during digital CES 2021, a completely new generation of processors for laptops will be presented – Ryzen 5000 “Cezanne”. Like its predecessor Ryzen 4000 “Renoir”, the processors are manufactured on TSMC’s 7-nanometer technology, but here the company takes the step over to its latest architecture Zen 3.

At the top is the Ryzen 7 5800U, which comes equipped with 8 cores and 16 wires at up to 4.4 GHz with a TDP value of 15 W. According to AMD, the new top model will beat Intel’s best Core i7-1185G “Tiger Lake”, which is not entirely unexpected as AMD has double the number of cores and threads. With the new generation, however, AMD promises to beat Intel in single-wire performance even on the laptop front.

While AMD highlights the performance Zen 3 offers, Lisa Su also talks about the energy efficiency of architecture. The result of that work is said to give up to 17.5 hours of battery life during actual use and 21 hours during video playback. It can be considered a strong statement and given that AMD does not go into further details, it is probably a best case scenario.

In addition to an update in the energy-efficient U-series, AMD is investing in a new HX series, where the focus shifts to laptops. These are Ryzen 9 5900HX and 9 5980HX at the top, both of which are unlocked for overclocking and have TDP values ​​of 45 W that can be increased further for higher performance.

Here, too, it is about 8 cores with 16 wires and at the hardware level it is probably about the same silicon as for the U-series. Interesting in this context is that AMD here reveals the amount of cache memory which is a total of 20 MB – 512 KB per core and 16 MB shared L3 cache memory. The latter is a duplication from the previous generation of portable processors.

According to Lisa Su, manufacturers are increasingly embracing AMD’s processors. While the first generation of laptop processors, the Ryzen 3000, received 70 design wins, the number climbed up to 100 for the Ryzen 4000. With the upcoming Ryzen 5000, AMD expects at least 150 laptop designers from the big giants.

AMD also gives a small taste of what is to come in graphics cards for laptops. Most gaming computers with AMD processors use Nvidia graphics cards, something that may change as the Radeon RX 6000 moves into laptops during the first half of the year. No details about specific models are given.

The first laptops with Ryzen 5000 processors will find their way onto store shelves in February.