Advanced Micro Devices showed off some impressive Ryzen 5000 mobile processors today and teased the performance of its 3rd Gen Epyc server chips.
Those chips are aimed at keeping AMD’s performance lead over its rival Intel in the mobile and server markets. AMD CEO Lisa Su showed off the new chips in a keynote speech at CES 2021, the online-only tech trade show.
AMD is launching its Ryzen 5000 Series mobile processors for gaming laptops and thin-and-light notebooks. These eight-core x86 chips are built with a 7-nanometer manufacturing process (where the circuits are 7 billionths of a meter apart). They are also based on the Zen3 design for processor cores, which can process instructions 19% faster per clock cycle than Zen2 cores.
The H-Series focuses on top performance in laptops for gamers and content creators, while the U-Series focuses on thin-and-light notebooks with great battery life. The chips have four to eight cores and they range in power consumption from 15 watts to 45 watts.
AMD said the 5000 Series will be available in PCs in February, and we’ll see more than 150 systems using it. That compares to 100 systems for the Ryzen 4000 Series and 70 for the Ryzen 3000.
Above: Lisa Su of AMD touts the company’s presence in game consoles.
Image Credit: AMD
These chips “carry with them many of the same things that made the desktop launch so darn strong,” said Robert Halleck, director of technical marketing, said in a press call.
One of the top chips is the AMD Ryzen 5980HS mobile processor, which has eight cores and 16 threads. It runs at a 3.0GHz base and can boost to 4.8GHz and consumers 35 watts. It’s not as fast on a single thread as Intel’s fastest chips, but it shines on multiprocessing.
“We’ve never had a stronger showing,” Halleck said. “In 2021, AMD will be in the lion’s share of the highest-end gaming notebooks.”
Market analyst firm Mercury Research has noted that AMD has gained market share in client computing chips for 12 straight quarters, ending in Q3 2020. For that quarter, AMD’s desktop share was 20%, up two percentage points from a year earlier and up seven percentage points from two years ago. In Q3, AMD’s mobile share was 20.2%, up 6 percentage points from a year earlier.
Above: AMD has been gaining share in mobile processors.
Image Credit: AMD/Mercury Research
Meanwhile, the AMD Ryzen 5900HX is the fastest chip, running 14% faster than Intel’s Core i9-10980HK processor on a single thread. Over CPU performance is about 37% faster, AMD said, and it is 21% faster on game physics performance. Su showed Horizon: Zero Dawn running on a PC at more than 100 frames per second.
The AMD Ryzen 5800U processor can perform 22% faster on productivity apps such as Excel, or 7% faster while browsing with Microsoft Edge. It gets about 17.5 hours of battery life with general usage.
“We’ve pushed battery life forward, we’re still the only company offering eight cores in ultrathin notebooks,” Halleck said. “It’s a very competitive product.”
AMD also previewed its third-generation Epyc processor for servers, which it said will have the highest x86 server processor performance on both per-core and throughput measurements. It is designed to power cloud services.
AMD claims that the 32-core chip will have a 68% higher performance than the 28-core Intel Xeon 6258R.
“3rd Gen Epyc will reset the bar for datacenter computing,” Su said.
Above: AMD Ryzen 5900HX chip compared to the competition.
Image Credit: AMD
Dylan Lawson, a product marketing director in AMD’s server division, said in a press call that AMD is shipping its latest 3rd Gen Epyc processor, code-named Milan, this quarter.
“You’re going to see us continue to drive the performance crown that we established with [code-named] Rome,” he said. “We continue to have very strong deployment with the big clouds.”
Su talked about how AMD is using tech to solve some of the world’s most challenging problems. She said that AMD helped with COVID-19 research by donating over 12 petaflops of supercomputing to the problem last year.
She also spoke with Panos Panay, Microsoft’s chief product officer, to discuss how the companies have adapted to new ways of communicating and collaborating, placing significantly higher demand on digital infrastructure and making devices like the PC even more essential.
Above: AMD’s market share growth in client x86 chips.
Image Credit: AMD/Mercury Research
Microsoft Teams now supporting 150 million daily active users, and AMD partners with Microsoft on cloud data centers. She also spoke with HP CEO Enrique Lores as well as Lenovo CEO Y.Y. Ching. Those are some pretty high-powered folks in computing. They said that the PC has proven more indispensable than ever in the pandemic.
AMD’s chips are also in the Microsoft Xbox Series X/S and the Sony PlayStation 5 game consoles.
Su said that AMD will bring the RDNA 2 architecture for its graphics processing units (GPUs) to gaming laptops, driving performance at 1440p and 50 frames per second. Those GPUs are coming in the first half of the year, for both mobile and desktop PCs.
Lastly, Su said AMD’s existing Ryzen Threadripper Pro Processors will now be directly available to consumers through participating global retailers and system integrators. Ryzen Threadripper Pro Processors have up to 64 cores, 8 channels of memory, RDIMM and LRDIMM support, 128 PCIe Gen 4 lanes and AMD Pro security.
