AMD Announces Powerful New Notebook CPUs For Gaming

AMD has revealed its latest range of Zen 3-powered APUs for notebooks at CES 2021, with a hint at new GPU architecture coming later this year.

Zen 3 is the architecture that powers last year's new desktop CPUs from AMD, with many of the gains transitioning to gaming notebooks later this year. Leading the pack is the AMD Ryzen 9 5980HX and 5900HX, both of which offer 8 cores and 16 threads, and base clocks of 3.30GHz. The chips differ when it comes to single-core boost speeds, with the 5980HX reaching 4.8GHz and the 5900HZ maxing out at 4.6GHz, both of which will be great for gaming.

AMD also revealed the full range of Ryzen 5 and 7 CPUs also coming to notebooks, with the major difference being the base and boost clock speeds decreasing down the order. Only the Ryzen 5 5600H will feature a reduced core count, dropping down from the 8 cores shared by the rest of the series to just 6 cores.

New APUs for ultrabooks were already revealed, with particular attention given to AMD's new Ryzen 7 5800U. Rated at just 15W, the 5800U can reach boost clock speeds of 4.4GHz for short, demanding workloads, while settling at 3.30GHz for its base clock. AMD says this is the fastest x86 processor for ultrabooks, likely making a distinction between itself and Apple's new ARM-powered M1 processor.

AMD also teased that RDNA 2, the architecture that powers its latest desktop graphics cards, the Xbox Series X, and the PlayStation 5, will be coming to notebooks later this year. The company hopes to launch with partners sometime in the first half of 2021.