AMD’s 7nm Ryzen 5000 mobile processors promise 2021’s best gaming notebooks

AMD announced its new Ryzen 5000 mobile CPUs during its CES 2021 keynote address. Most (but not all) are based on the company’s 7nm “Zen 3” architecture. AMD CEO Lisa Su calls the series ‘the most powerful computer processors ever built’.

As with the previous generation, the 5000 series has two categories for two different audiences. There’s the H-Series – which you’ll find on laptops designed for game and content creation – and the U-Series, designed for ultra-portable laptops. (Three of the U-series slides are based on the older Zen 2 architecture, which is annoying.)

Within those categories are the Ryzen 3, Ryzen 5, Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 9 levels (separate counterparts from Intel’s Core i3, Core i5, Core i7 and Core i9, respectively). The H-Series retains the H and HS suffixes of the 4000 Series, in addition to a new HX designation.

The U-Series is the eight-core, 16-wire Ryzen 7 5800U, with 1.9 GHz clock speeds that can increase to 4.4 GHz. AMD claims that this chip delivers ‘the fastest productivity in ultra-thin laptops’. By company standards, the chip surpasses the Intel Core i7-1165G7 by a factor of 1.23 on PCMark 10 and beats it on a subtest with a number of office applications, including Excel and Edge (although the two chips on PowerPoint is connected, and Intel wins very narrowly on Word).

The company also claims that the 5800U can provide up to 17.5 hours of battery life for general use and 21 hours of movie viewing. That would be a lot of juice, even for AMD, but we’ll have more accurate estimates if we try out the systems.

On the H series, the big player is the Ryzen 9 5980HS, also with eight core locks and 16 wires, but with 3.0 GHz clock speeds that increase to 4.8 GHz. AMD says it’s the fastest mobile processors you can get ‘. The 5980HS is several steps above the Ryzen 9 4900HS, the monstrous chip that powers Asus’ 2020 Zephyrus G14.

AMD claims that the Ryzen 9 5980HS defeats Intel’s Core i9-10980HK on Cinebench R20 in both single-wire performance (601 to Intel’s 514) and multi-wire performance (4349 to the i9s 3892). It also beats the newer Core i7-1185G7 in both cases.

New in the H series are the HX chips, which according to AMD are meant for ‘serious games’. AMD claims that it will drive its Ryzen 9 5900HX, at 45W + TDP, ‘the best notebooks for the game for 2021’.

By company standards, the chip beats the Core i9-10980HP on Cinebench R20 (single wire) by 14 percent, 37 percent on Passmark P10 (measures overall CPU performance) and 21 percent on 3DMark Fire Strike Physics (which measures graphics performance) )).

Su expects more than 150 Ryzen 5000 laptops to launch this year – she expects the first to hit the shelves in February.

The big question is how these processors compare to Intel’s new Tiger Lake H systems – the company announced the chips during the CES 2021 keynote address yesterday. All three of these chips (including two Core i7s and one Core i5) are maximum 35W and have only four cores and eight wires – half the number of Ryzen offerings. However, Intel says there will be an eight-core processor with speeds up to 5 GHz later this quarter. This is probably what AMD should be wary of.