AMD unveiled the Ryzen 5000 Mobile processor lineup earlier this month, and now the company says the first laptops with 35+ watt Ryzen 5000 H series chips hit the streets starting today.
Ahead of launch, the chip maker sent Asus ROG Flow X13 thin and light gaming laptops with Ryzen 9 5980HS processors to a number of tech reviewers, and early reviews indicate that AMD’s flagship “Cezanne” processor largely delivers on AMD’s promises: users can expect double-digit performance in single-core and multi-core workloads.
That’s due to a move from Zen 2 architecture to new Zen 3 CPU cores, a new unified L3 cache structure (not to mention double the overall cache, now at 16MB), an upgraded memory controller, and a new memory controller, among other things.
It’s too early to say whether these sorts of performance gains will be available in all of AMD’s new chips. Like most companies, AMD sent out review units configured to show off its new technology in the most flattering light.
With that in mind, it’s interesting to note that while AMD promises “impressive” battery life for notebooks with Ryzen 5000 HS series processors, reviewers suggest that the Asus ROG Flow X13 tops out at around 6 hours of run time for general usage or closer to an hour for gaming.
But it’s worth noting that the laptop only has a relatively modest 62 Wh battery and in addition to AMD’s processor, it packs NVIDIA GeForce GTX Max-Q integrated graphics (and the laptop comes with an external graphics dock with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 GPU for when you need more horsepower and don’t mind plugging in). All of which is to say, you may see longer battery life from other notebooks with the same processor.
The Ryzen 5000 H series processors feature the same AMD Radeon Vega integrated graphics as the chip maker’s 4000 series chips rather than newer GPUs based on the company’s RDNA graphics technology. But AMD has increased the top frequency, which should allow you to squeeze a little extra graphics performance out of the new chips.
The decision to focus primarily on the CPU cores may also be part of what allowed AMD to make the new chips pin-to-pin compatible with last year’s mobile chips, making it easy for PC makers to upgrade their designs quickly.
And when it comes to CPU-specific tasks, it looks like AMD’s new chips are competitive with the latest Intel Tiger Lake processors when it comes to single-core performance, and the Ryzen 5980HS comes out way ahead in multi-core tests, which is unsurprising since it has twice as many CPU cores and threads as Intel’s chips.
You can find more details in the following reviews and write-ups:
AMD Ryzen 5000 H deep dives
- AnandTech (almost always the first site I check for CPU architecture analysis)
- Gizmodo
- Hexus
- NotebookCheck (benchmarks)
- PC Mag
- PC Watch (Japanese)
- TechSpot
- Tom’s Hardware
ASUS ROG Flow X13 reviews
And here’s an overview of the complete Ryzen 5000 H series processor lineup:
| Name | Cores / Threads | Base freq | Boost Freq | Cache | TDP |
| Ryzen 9 5980HX | 8 / 16 | 3.3 GHz | 4.8 GHz | 20MB | 45W+ |
| Ryzen 9 5980HS | 8 / 16 | 3 GHz | 4.8 GHz | 20MB | 35W |
| Ryzen 9 5900HX | 8 / 16 | 3.3 GHz | 3.6 GHz | 20MB | 45W+ |
| Ryzen 9 5900HS | 8 / 16 | 3 GHz | 4.6 GHz | 20MB | 35W |
| Ryzen 7 5800H | 8 / 16 | 3.2 GHz | 4.4 GHz | 20MB | 45W |
| Ryzen 7 5800HS | 8 / 16 | 2.8 GHz | 4.4 GHz | 20MB | 35W |
| Ryzen 5 5600H | 6 / 12 | 3.3 GHz | 4.2 GHz | 19MB | 45W |
| Ryzen 5 5600HS | 6 / 12 | 3 GHz | 4.2 GHz | 19MB | 35W |
Hi, the headline has a typo. “they’re” should be the headline not “their”. AMD looking good in 2021.