AMD’s Ryzen 6000 laptop chips finally modernize their built-in Radeon GPUs

Enlarge / AMD's Lisa Su introduces the Ryzen 6000 APU lineup. (credit: AMD)

AMD made small additions to its dedicated GPU and its processor lineups at its CES press conference this morning, but the biggest announcement was the introduction of new Ryzen 6000-series laptop APUs. These chips use a new Zen 3+ CPU architecture and manufacturing process, but most significantly, their integrated graphics processors trade the years-old Vega architecture for the modern RDNA2 architecture used in Radeon 6000-series graphics cards, the newest Xbox and PlayStation consoles, and the upcoming Steam Deck.

AMD says that the new chips will begin showing up in February 2022, with more laptops released "throughout the year."

AMD's new Ryzen 6000-series APU lineup for laptops. (credit: AMD)

The H-, HS-, and HX-series Ryzen chips are all 35 W and 45 W processors destined for gaming laptops and workstations, and they have higher CPU and GPU clock speeds than the U-series chips. The Ryzen 5 6600U and Ryzen 7 6800U have TDPs of between 15 and 28 W, which can be adjusted by laptop manufacturers based on how much cooling they can provide-the higher the TDP, the longer the CPUs will be able to run at their top speeds. All of the Ryzen 9 and Ryzen 7 models include Radeon 680M GPUs with 12 GPU cores, while the Ryzen 5 models use weaker Radeon 660M GPUs with 6 GPU cores.

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