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From new laptop chips to a Zen 4 future, here's what AMD revealed at CES
AMD announced the Ryzen 5000 series of laptop processors at CES 2021 almost exactly a year ago, and so it’s no surprise to see that the company has used CES 2022 to announce the Ryzen 6000 series and more products.
Ryzen 6000 series
The veteran chipmaker’s latest chips are still based on the Zen 3 architecture, offering between six cores (with 12 threads) and eight cores (with 16 threads), and a 6nm TSMC manufacturing process (down from 7nm on the 5000 series).
These aren’t the only upgrades, as the Ryzen 6000 series also gains RDNA2 graphics for the first time. This should give a notable boost to integrated graphics performance on paper, replacing the Vega graphics that have been used for a while now. This GPU also supports hardware-based ray tracing, DirectX 12 Ultimate, and AMD’s FidelityFX super-resolution tech. You can check out the full list of new Ryzen 6000 processors below, bar the last three entries.
AMD claims that the Ryzen 6000 series offers an average of a 1.3X boost to processing and a two-fold increase in graphical power. This doesn’t seem to come at the expense of endurance though, as the firm claimed that the chip range offers up to 24 hours of battery life due to new power management features. We’re guessing this statistic comes with several caveats though (e.g. battery size, processor type).
Otherwise, you can also expect support for DDR5/LPDDR5 memory, Microsoft’s Pluton security processor, PCIe Gen 4, the AV1 codec, Bluetooth 5.2, Wi-Fi 6E, and USB 4 at 40Gbps.
AMD says over 200 premium laptop designs are coming later this year using the Ryzen 6000 series platform, with the first laptops coming in February.
What else did AMD announce?
The chipmaker had a ton to share on the GPU front too, but the RX6000S GPU series was perhaps the most interesting announcement in this regard. AMD says this series is specifically built for thin gaming laptops (with “S” standing for “slim), consisting of the RX6600S, RX6700S, and RX6800S GPUs.
The firm presented a slide showing what you can expect in terms of frames per second (fps) in “the latest AAA and esport gaming titles.” It shows that you can expect 80+ fps at high settings with the RX6600S, 100+ fps at high settings with the RX6700S, and 100+ fps at max settings with the RX6800S. We’d definitely like to see a more granular breakdown of performance in various games, but it tentatively sounds like those looking for thin gaming laptops might have far more options in 2022.
AMD also had something for desktop gamers, offering the RX6500XT. The GPU brings 2.6GHz clock speeds, 16MB infinity cache, 16 compute units and ray accelerators, and a 6nm process. Expect to pay $199 for the card, with availability from January 19.
AMD also announced a few new software additions, with the biggest feature undoubtedly being Radeon Super Resolution. This feature brings FidelityFX super-resolution tech to “nearly every game you own,” as opposed to a game explicitly supporting it. The company says you simply need to turn it on in the GPU’s software and lower your game’s resolution to have the tech kick in.
Finally, the company teased the first Zen 4 desktop chip (seen above), dubbed the Ryzen 7000 series. The firm revealed that the chip is built on a 5nm process and will be available from the second half of 2022. It also briefly demonstrated Halo Infinite running at 1080p on a pre-production chip running at 5GHz.