The first laptops powered by AMD’s Ryzen 6000 mobile processors should arrive soon with new models on the way from Acer, Asus, Dell (Alienware), Lenovo, Razer, and others. While AMD’s 2022 mobile chip lineup will eventually include a wide range of processors including 15-watt U-series chips and 45+ watt Ryzen 6000HX series processors, the first laptops to hit the streets will be powered by 35-watt HS series processors.

Some of the first include the 2022 versions of the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 and Acer Nitro 5 gaming laptops, and the first reviews are starting to arrive.

Asus ROG Zephyrus G14

For the most part, AMD’s new chips seem to offer a modest boost in CPU performance when compared with their Ryzen 5000 counterparts. But AMD has moved from a 7nm manufacturing process to 6nm, bringing improved density and efficiency.

Tom’s Hardware reports that while CPU performance gains measured in the single-digit percentages might sound underwhelming at a time when Intel’s 12th-gen Core H-series chips are delivering much bigger gains, AMD seems confident that its approach is more efficient than Intel’s, which will allow the same CPU architecture to scale well to energy-efficient U-series chips and high-performance H-series processor while allowing for long battery life.

Intel’s 12th-gen “Alder Lake” processors use a hybrid architecture that combines high-performance CPU cores with energy-efficient cores, allowing a PC to use just the cores that are needed for a certain task or to fire up all the cores at once. AMD says it’s only using high-performance cores, but they offer the kind of efficiency needed to balance power consumption and battery life in laptops.

AMD Ryzen 6000 H Series
ChipCPU archGPU archCores / ThreadsBase / Max freqL2 + L3 CacheGPU cores / max freqNodeTDP
Ryzen 9 6980HSZen 3+RDNA 28 / 163.3 GHz / 5 GHz20MB12 / 2.4 GHz6nm35W
Ryzen 9 6900HSZen 3+RDNA 28 / 163.3 GHz / 4.9 GHz20MB12 / 2.4 GHz6nm35W
Ryzen 7 6800HSZen 3+RDNA 28 / 163.2 GHz / 4.7 GHz20MB12 / 2.2 GHz6nm35W
Ryzen 5 6600HSZen 3+RDNA 26 /123.3 GHz / 4.5 GHz19MB6 / 1.9 GHz6nm35W

That said, Tom’s Hardware notes that some of AMD’s claims seem a bit questionable, stating that a Ryzen 9 6900HS processor is up to 2.62X more efficient than a Core i9-12900HK because the former tops out at 35-watts during sustained performance while the later can go as high as 110 watts… but it’s highly unlikely that any laptops will actually have the cooling capabilities to allow Intel’s chip to stay at 110 watts for very long.

Anyway, while it remains to be seen whether AMD’s 6000 chips will be truly competitive with Intel’s Alder Lake processors this year when it comes to CPU performance, AMD will most likely take the lead when it comes to integrated graphics performance.

For the past few years AMD has been using its Radeon Vega architecture for integrated graphics. This year’s chips ship with Radeon 600M graphics based on RDNA 2 architecture and according to the company’s own benchmarks, not only does it outperform Intel’s Iris Xe graphics in gaming benchmarks, but it comes close to NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 1650 discrete GPU.

Right now it seems like Intel may have the edge in CPU performance, while AMD is taking the lead in integrated graphics. But it’s unclear if that will continue to be the case as the companies release more chips: so far we’ve only seen independent reviews of devices powered by H-series processors, and it’s possible that they won’t be reflective of the more energy-efficient U-series chips set to launch later this year.

We may have to wait a little while to see laptops that truly take advantage of AMD’s new integrated GPU because the first laptops to ship will have Ryzen 6000HS chips paired with discrete graphics from AMD or NVIDIA. While the integrated graphics will likely handle some tasks, those discrete GPUs will most likely kick in when you need them most for things like gaming, graphic design, or video editing.

You can find more details about AMD’s Ryzen 6000HS series processors at Tom’s Hardware and 3DGuru.

Support Liliputing

Liliputing's primary sources of revenue are advertising and affiliate links (if you click the "Shop" button at the top of the page and buy something on Amazon, for example, we'll get a small commission).

But there are several ways you can support the site directly even if you're using an ad blocker* and hate online shopping.

Contribute to our Patreon campaign

or...

Contribute via PayPal

* If you are using an ad blocker like uBlock Origin and seeing a pop-up message at the bottom of the screen, we have a guide that may help you disable it.

Subscribe to Liliputing via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 9,545 other subscribers

3 replies on “AMD launches 35-watt Ryzen 6000HS laptop chips with RDNA 2 graphics”

  1. I think AMD’s approach is the sweet spot for thin and light laptops and even gaming laptops. Most production applications now days can take advantage of GPU compute and AMD’s Zen 3 cores were already up to the task of supporting productivity and gaming workloads. The limitations have been and will likely continue to be in the GPU department. I’m looking forward to a thin 14 inch laptop with Zen 3+ and near Nvidia 1650 levels of GPU performance for around 750 to 900 USD. I am still very happy with my 2021 Zephyrus G15 with 3070 for gaming but I have been looking for a new laptop for work since my company issued 2c/4t 7th gen i5 was crappy 4 years ago and isn’t aging well.

Comments are closed.