AMD Announces New Laptop and Data Center Chips at CES
Right then. AMD came to CES 2021 with something to prove and honestly they might have done it. Lisa Su took the virtual stage and basically said Intel whos Intel? without actually saying those words.
The big announcement was the Ryzen 5000 Series Mobile processors. These are laptop chips based on AMDs Zen 3 architecture which has been absolutely crushing it on the desktop side. The company is claiming leadership performance across the board and for once the benchmarks seem to back that up.
These new chips offer tremendous performance and battery life Su said during her keynote. And heres the kicker – AMD is now the only company with an eight-core processor in an ultrathin laptop. The U-series operates on a 15-watt TDP design which means thin and light machines can actually have some proper horsepower under the hood.
Battery life is rated at up to 17.5 hours for general usage or 21 hours for movie playback. Thats genuinely impressive if it holds up in real-world testing. Laptop battery claims are usually about as reliable as weather forecasts but still.
For the gaming crowd AMD announced an unlocked 45-watt HX series. The flagship Ryzen 9 5900HX boosts up to 4.6GHz and can be overclocked. Gaming laptops are about to get interesting.
But the enterprise stuff is where things get properly exciting if youre into that sort of thing. AMD gave a preview of their 3rd Gen EPYC processors codenamed Milan. These server chips are also based on Zen 3 and the performance numbers are frankly absurd.
They showed a weather simulation benchmark comparing a 32-core Milan processor against Intels 28-core Xeon Gold 6258R. The EPYC chip completed the simulation 68% faster. Sixty-eight percent. In server terms thats not a marginal improvement thats a different league entirely.
Milan launches later this quarter Su said. Intel should be worried.
AMD also announced that Threadripper PRO processors will now be available to consumers through retailers and system integrators. Previously these beasts were a Lenovo exclusive. Were talking up to 64 cores 128 threads 8 memory channels and 128 PCIe Gen 4 lanes. Overkill for most people but exactly right for high-performance workstations doing serious compute work.
Lucasfilm showed up to testify about how theyve gone exclusively AMD for their render farm. When the people making Star Wars choose your chips thats decent marketing.
The desktop side got some love too with reduced-TDP versions of the Ryzen 9 5900X and Ryzen 7 5800X coming to pre-built OEM systems. These 65-watt parts should make for quieter more efficient machines without sacrificing too much performance.
So where does this leave us? AMD has momentum and theyre clearly not slowing down. Intel has been promising competitive products for years now but keeps pushing back dates. Meanwhile AMD just keeps executing.
The laptop market in particular feels like its about to shift. For years Intel had that space locked up. Now you can get a thin ultrabook with eight Zen 3 cores that doesnt cook your lap or drain its battery in three hours. Thats a meaningful improvement for people who actually use laptops for work.
2021 is shaping up to be another good year for AMD. Whether Intel can respond remains to be seen. But for now Team Red is looking pretty confident.
Source: Digital Trends
