AMD made small additions to its dedicated GPU and processor lineups at its CES press conference this morning, but the biggest announcement was the introduction of the new Ryzen 6000 series of laptop APUs. These chips use the new Zen 3+ CPU architecture and manufacturing process, but most importantly, their integrated GPUs change the legacy Vega architecture to the modern RDNA2 architecture used in the Radeon 6000 series graphics cards, the latest Xbox and PlayStation consoles, and the upcoming Steam Deck.
AMD says the new chips will start showing up in February 2022, with more laptops coming “throughout the year.”
All Ryzen H, HS, and HX-series chips are 35W and 45W processors designed for gaming laptops and workstations, and have higher CPU and GPU clock speeds than U-series chips. Ryzen 5 6600U and Ryzen 7 6800U have TDPs from 15 to 28W, which laptop manufacturers can adjust depending on how much cooling they can provide – the higher the TDP, the longer the processors will be able to run at maximum power. speed. All Ryzen 9 and Ryzen 7 models include Radeon 680M GPUs with 12 GPU cores, while Ryzen 5 models use the weaker Radeon 660M GPUs with 6 GPU cores.
The Zen 3+ CPU architecture uses a new 6nm process from TSMC, rather than the 7nm process used in most Zen 3 processors. Fast SSDs will get PCI Express 4.0 support, a first for AMD APUs. And the new chips support DDR5 RAM across the board, which will provide more memory bandwidth for both the CPU and GPU (though there’s no DDR4 support at all, which could make these systems more expensive and harder to upgrade in the near future).
Integrated RDNA2 GPUs support hardware accelerated ray tracing and DirectX 12 Ultimate, just like dedicated RDNA2 cards. AMD claims they are “up to 2.1x faster”than the Vega GPUs found in the 5000-series APUs, allowing the “vast majority of games”to run smoothly at 1080p. The Radeon 600 branding is actually a legacy from a much older line of laptop GPUs introduced way back in 2019, which says something about how AMD is trying to position them: not up to the level of full featured Radeon RX 6000 series chips, but eliminating them entirely. the need for a cheap level of mobile GPUs with better integration.
Finally, all Ryzen 6000 chips include the Microsoft Pluton security processor, designed to improve the security of Windows 10 and Windows 11 PCs. Pluton is designed to standardize security updates at the firmware level so that they can be installed via Windows Update. Pluton also provides an emulated TPM for Windows, which has the same benefits as a separate hardware or firmware TPM, but eliminates the communication bus between the CPU and the TPM. This removes an attack surface that could otherwise be exploited by people who have physical access to your computer.
AMD is also offering a few less impressive iterative improvements to its Ryzen 5000 series laptop APU lineup. The Ryzen 3 5425U, Ryzen 5 5625U, and Ryzen 7 5825U add 100MHz to the peak overclock and add a bit of extra L3 cache to the Ryzen 5400U, 5600U, and 5800U respectively. They all still use the original Zen 3 CPU architecture and the Vega GPU architecture.