AMD Rolls Out New Ryzen Chips & Gaming Laptops

Advanced Micro Devices shares dipped lower Tuesday after the chip maker revealed a fresh lineup of laptop and data-center chips.

At the 2021 Nevada-based CES, AMD CEO Lisa Su said that the company was rolling out the Ryzen 5000 line of CPU chips for ultrathin and gaming laptops. Su mentioned that the new Ryzen chips allow a laptop to run 17.5 hours in normal use or for up to 21 hours of movie viewing on one charge. The chip is slated to debut in more than 150 models of laptops this year, with the first designs hitting stores in February.

Su also explained that AMD was releasing its third-generation Epyc processor, code-named “Milan,” for use in data centers, with more details to be released in the first quarter. AMD shares, which were pretty much flat as the keynote got rolling and went up as much as 1.5% before dropping  2% shortly after the keynote’s conclusion.

Due to the pandy, CES, the most watched technology trade show of the year, is taking place virtually this year, leading to a headline frenzy from chip makers and other tech companies releasing new products. “AMD’s Ryzen 5000 looks to be very competitive in thin and light and gaming laptops,” Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, told MarketWatch. “If AMD can get more OEM designs, this would enable it to gain more market share.”

AMD’s Dr Lisa Su announces the Ryzen 5000 series mobile processors. The Ryzen 5000-series processors come in three new models that sport its new 7nm Zen 3 architecture and as we saw with its desktop processors, these new CPUs are likely to offer massive performance gains across the board. The flagship is the Ryzen 9 5980HX – an eight-core, 16-thread CPU with a boost frequency of 4.8GHz.

“Its biggest notebook challenge is the commercial notebook market and that wasn’t addressed today,” Moorhead noted. “The third-generation Epyc disclosure was just a flyby and not enough information was disclosed to determine the degree of competitiveness.”

While gaming laptops focus their design around a fast graphics processor, commercial notebooks focus more on extra long battery life and durability. Rival Nvidia [$NVDA] made a similar announcement to AMD in Tuesday [Nvidia Jumps as Analysts Say Its a Buy Ahead of the CES Trade Show] with a new line of gaming laptops based on the company’s 30-series GPUs that will be available to the public later this month.

Intel [$INTC] shares, on the other hand, were up 3.8% following the chip maker’s unveiling of four new lines of its Xeon processors late Monday. Intel is looking to rival AMD and Nvidia with 7-nanometer discrete gaming chips manufactured by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. [$TSM]

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