AMD is shaking up notebooks again with its new Ryzen 5000 mobile processors

Note: This article was first published on 13 Jan 2021.

AMD is finally bringing its Zen 3 architecture to notebooks. At CES 2021, AMD CEO Dr Lisa Su just announced the company's new Ryzen 5000 series mobile processors.

This announcement is impressive considering it was only just a year ago at CES 2020 that AMD unveiled its Ryzen 4000 series mobile processors, which have gone on to receive rave reviews.

Naturally, AMD is claiming big performance and efficiency gains with its new Ryzen 5000 series processors.

U-series for ultraportable notebooks

With a rated TDP of 15W, the U-series processors are designed to go into ultra-thin, ultraportable notebooks. Heading this lineup is the Ryzen 7 5800U, which is an 8-core CPU that can boost up to 4.4GHz.

Charts shown during the presentation shows a Ryzen 7 5800U being up to 18% faster in digital contention creation and up to 44% faster in video encoding than Intel's Core i7-1185G7.

As for efficiency, AMD claims its Ryzen 7 5800U, on a notebook with a 53Wh battery, can play 1080p video with Wi-Fi on for over 21 hours and last over 17 hours on MobileMark 2018's battery life test. 

What's confusing, however, is that some of the Ryzen 5000 U series processors are based on AMD's older Zen 2 architecture. Essentially, they are a rebadge of Ryzen 4000 mobile series chips. But what's really baffling is that AMD is mixing things up so there's a Ryzen 7 chip that's based on Zen 3 and there's another that's based on Zen 2. This will no doubt confuse less savvy consumers.

Here's what the U series lineup looks like:

H-series for gaming notebooks

These are AMD's top tier mobiles processors and, thankfully, they are all based on the new Zen 3 architecture.

Like Intel, AMD has a 35W category that they are calling the HS series. Presumably, these will go into super thin and light gaming notebooks.

The most demanding users will likely be interested in the HX series processors which have a TDP of 45W and beyond. These will go up against Intel's H-series Comet Lake processors and can hit turbo boost speeds of up to 4.8GHz.

Here's what the H series lineup looks like:

Interestingly, it seems that the only distinguishing feature of HS processors is that they have lower base clocks. Also, there's no H series Ryzen 9 processors, which means if manufacturers want to take advantage of the Ryzen 9 branding, they'll either have to build something sleek and sexy or go all-out on power.

As for availability, AMD says that they have over 150 design wins for Ryzen 5000 mobile and that the first notebooks to feature these new processors will be in retail as soon as February.

Our articles may contain affiliate links. If you buy through these links, we may earn a small commission.