CES 2021: AMD Unveils Zen 3 Notebook CPUs – Ryzen 5000H And 5000U Series

The main focus of the AMD keynote speech for CES 2021 was laptops and their more slender brethren, the ultrathin notebooks. Dr. Lisa Su unveiled a large range of CPUs with onboard graphics (APUs) specifically designed for these devices.

The two main ranges unveiled were the Ryzen 5000H series, representing the higher end of performance for full-sized laptops, and the more ultrathin notebook orientated Ryzen 5000U series, with thermal designs below the required 15W needed for these devices. The 5000H series is entirely comprised of processors using the new Zen 3 architecture that we saw unveiled back in October 2020, designated as being part of the ‘Cezanne H’ family of APUs, whereas the 5000U series has a mix of Zen 3 architecture chips (the ‘Cezanne U’ family) and some of the previous generation Zen 2 architecture ones (known as the ‘Lucienne U’ family).

For the Zen 3, Cezanne chips at least (it wasn’t clear if this also applied to the Zen 2 Lucienne ones as well) AMD promised market-leading battery life for all x86 notebooks thanks to the efficiencies they’ve made. The Ryzen 7 5800U got particular attention, boasting a supposed 17.5 hours general usage battery life, and up to 21 hours movie playback battery life (though as ever, take these with a pinch of salt).

The Ryzen 9 5900HX (3.30 Ghz base clock / 4.60 Ghz boost clock) and Ryzen 9 5980HX (3.30 Ghz base clock / 4.80 Ghz boost clock) are the flagship gaming processors, both coming with enhanced Vega GPUs and also coming with overclocking support (a first for AMD notebook CPUs). Both also have 8 cores (16 threads) and 16 MB of L3 Cache and 4MB L2 cache.

We were assured that we would start to see the first laptops and notebooks with this technology appearing in February 2021. As soon as we can get our hands on one of them you can be sure we will be doing our own benchmark testing.