AMD has provided an closer look at its upcoming Ryzen 6000 series mobile CPUs. With slimmer, lighter, and more energy-efficient designs, the company hopes to gain a leading position in the laptop sector this year.
At CES this year, AMD unveiled their Ryzen 6000 'Rembrandt' mobile CPUs, which will have the new Zen 3+ CPU architecture and RDNA 2 integrated graphics fabbed on TSMC's 6nm node. The first 35W HS-series units, which adress the thin-and-light market and can boost up to 5.0 GHz on the flagship model. AMD also rebranded its integrated graphics as the Radeon 600M Series. System-on-chips (SoC) rather than isolated CPUs should be considered when designing mobile processors, and the linked nature of technology implementation is crucial for maximizing the performance of any design. Take, for example, each component of the Ryzen 6000 Series mobile processor one at a time.
Gaming
To begin, the top-binned GPU. The 680M holds 12 Compute Units (768 cores) that can operate at rates of up to 2.5GHz. Because the design is largely identical to that of contemporary desktop graphics cards, the 680M's natural performance is equivalent to that of the RX 6400. On the connector side up to four separate displays are supported using FreeSync-compatible RDNA 2 graphics. Additionally, HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 2 are supported, and the hardware encode and decode features match those found on the most recent desktop cards. Integrated GPUs are typically insufficiently powerful and inappropriate for 1080p gaming; in the absence of a dedicated graphics card, they borrow memory. The new Radeon 600M integrated graphics, on the other hand, supports 1080p gaming in the majority of AAA titles, although with some low to medium visual settings. AMD claims that the 680M graphics in the Ryzen 7 6800U are nearly twice as fast as Intel's Iris Xe. Benchmark results against a GeForce MX 450 show an average frame rate of 48fps on demanding titles like Cyberpunk 2077 and a record-breaking 132fps on CS:GO. AMD's Zen3+ architecture with RDNA 2 already enables power reductions while maintaining low latency. However, when FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution) and RSR (Radeon Super Resolution) are enabled, the 680M CPU outperforms gaming laptops with discrete GPUs – albeit at the expense of some visual quality. Benchmarks show that the Ryzen 5 6600U with Radeon 660M graphics surpasses Intel's Core i5-1135G7 processor. When compared to a GeForce MX 450, these new discrete GPUs can match framerates to a point, but fall short by 4 to 5 frames per second in demanding games like Battlefield 5. When FSR and RSR are activated, the statistics take that up a notch.
The new Zen 3+ cores prioritize performance while lowering energy consumption, providing up to 24 hours of battery life under normal conditions. It is the first chip to fully support Windows 11 security and is capable of adjusting for many displays used by video creators and streamers. The processor supports USB 4.0, DDR5 RAM, PCIe 4.0, and Wi-Fi 6E, as you'd expect from a laptop from 2022. DisplayPort 2 compatibility is also included, allowing you to connect an additional display with a high refresh rate. Longer battery life and smaller form factors are becoming more popular in the market. The Ryzen 9 6900HS surpasses the 12th Gen Core i9 by 2.62 times, as seen by the benchmark test above. Not to mention that such results are obtained with only 35W of continuous CPU power while operating 8 cores at full load. To put this in context, the Core i9-12900HK is a hexacore processor. Each iteration, the Ryzen 6000 series delivers 40% better base speeds, 1.17 times faster CPU compute, 1.81 times faster graphics, and up to 3 hours greater battery life at 15W. Web browsing and other productivity tasks are faster, as expected. 3D GPU rendering, on the other hand, easily takes the cake, with a 3.05x performance improvement over the previous-generation Ryzen 7 5800U CPU.
AMD plans to debut the HX Series gaming laptops and the U Series ultrathin laptop CPUs in March. A Pro range geared at commercial and business aficionados may also be offered later on.