AMD Announces Ryzen 5000 CPU, Mobile RDNA2 GPU and More at CES 2021

During a virtual keynote at CES 2021 presented by AMD CEO Dr. Lisa S, the company announced the new Ryzen 5000 laptop processors, also teased the upcoming Radeon GPUs for the desktops and laptops and next-gen Epyc datacentre CPU which is the future, according to the company.

The new Ryzen 5000 CPU will be based on the 7nm Zen 3 architecture which has seen the largest performance jump since the inception of the Ryzen family, says AMD. Firstly, we have the Ryzen 5800U which is an x86 processor that features an eight-core design and poses a 15W thermal envelope. This CPU is aimed at ultra-thin laptops. We have the Ryzen 7 5800U which can deliver general use of up to 17.5 hours and video playback of up to 21 hours.

AMD compared this processor to the Intel Core i7-1185G7 and claimed that the Ryzen 7 5800U delivers 18% better performance in PCMark 10 and up to 44% faster media encoding in Adobe Premier and up to 39% faster performance in Blender 3D. A total of 5 U-series Ryzen 5000 CPUs have been announced out of which the base quad-core Ryzen 3 5300U and even the Ryzen 7 5700U will continue using the Zen 2 architecture.

The company also presented Ryzen HX for high-end gaming laptops and promised that this CPU will deliver “ultimate performance” for desktop-class gaming laptops. It will have higher thermal envelope ratings up to 45W and will ship with unlocked overclocking ability. The Ryzen 9 5900HX was able to render Horizon Zero Dawn at 1080p resolution in high detail settings touching 100+fps consistently. The GPU and either hardware details used for this setup are unknown.

The Ryzen 9 5900HX features 8 cores and 16 threads 20MB of L2+L3 cache, and a 45W TDP. It can achieve a clock speed of 4.6GHz when boosted whereas the Ryzen 9 5980HX can touch 4.8GHz with the same configuration. There are a total of eight Ryzen 5000 H-series CPUs with 35W and 45W TDPs which AMD unveiled at the keynote.  When compared to Intel’s Core i9-10980HK the AMD CPU gets a 13% better score in  Cinebench R20’s single-threaded test and up to 35%  better performance in Passmark’s CPU test. According to AMD, it can deliver smooth 4K gameplay in outshining the competition in terms of both single-thread and multi-thread performance.

New laptops from leading companies like Asus, Acer, HP, Lenovo, and Dell powered by these new CPUs will be available before the end of Q1 2021. The company CEO says a minimum of 150 models will be released showing a growth of 50% over the previous generation.

Apart from this, the company also announced new desktop Ryzen 5000 CPUs, the 12-core Ryzen 9 5900 and 8-core Ryzen 7 5800, both with 65W TDPs. In addition, Ryzen Threadripper Pro CPUs with up to 64 cores will be sold via retailers and not only inside workstations. AMD also teased the RDNA2 architecture-based GPUs and they are rumored to be the  RX 6700 series which will soon power mid-range desktops and laptops coming out in the first half of the year. RDNA2 features the same architecture seen in AMD’s Radeon RX 6800 and Radeon RX 6900 GPUs and the custom-made chips that power the latest PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S and Series X.