AMD’s CEO, Dr. Lisa Su
AMD
AMD’s CEO, Dr. Lisa Su, was back again this year with the company’s CES 2021 Keynote, which was closely watched by the entire industry. 2020 was an excellent year for AMD, starting at CES 2020 with the announcement of the Ryzen 4000 series in laptops. Although AMD has not fully reported its financials for the year 2020, expectations are high for AMD’s fourth quarter and full year 2020 results. The company has made a significant turnaround in both consumer and business CPU and significant progress in the field of GPU. AMD now occupies a leading position in desktop CPUs, which the company hasn’t had in over a decade, and the industry expected this to trickle down to laptops.
AMD traditionally uses CES to launch its latest generation of laptop CPUs, and this year was no different with the introduction of the Ryzen 5000 series of mobile processors. The Ryzen 5000 processor series is the fastest the company has ever launched and features three different performance levels: U-series low-power processors, H-series high-performance processors and HX-series performance gaming processors. However, there is one thing about the Ryzen 5000 series that some may not know: not all of AMD’s Ryzen 5000 series have the Zen 3 architecture. Only the Ryzen 5 5600U and Ryzen 7 5800U are Zen 3, which benefit from a higher IPC, higher clock speed and more shared cache.
AMD’s Ryzen 5000 HX series of notebook processors currently consists of two processors, the Ryzen 9 5900HX and the Ryzen 9 5980HX. Both CPUs are eight core designs with 20MB of L2 and L3 cache and a boost of 4.6 and 4.8 GHz. These chips have a TDP of 45W +, which we assume usually means 45W, except in specific scenarios, but at the moment we don’t know what that means at all, other than that these are very powerful processors. These are the processors you would expect AMD to do to compete with Intel’s latest 11th Gen of gaming processors I reviewed earlier this week. Numerous OEMs have already committed to using these chips in their gaming laptops, including Acer and ASUS.
As a whole, I think AMD’s overall laptop range has become more complete and appealing to OEMs and consumers, which is why AMD has managed to grow the company’s overall laptop design year after year. In fact, in just two years, AMD has managed to double its total mobile design gains from 70 systems with the Ryzen 3000 series to 150 mobile systems with the Ryzen 5000 series. This shows that OEMs are embracing AMD’s CPUs on both desktop and mobile in ways they never had before. In fact, Lisa Su had the CEOs of HP and Lenovo, as well as Microsoft’s Panos Panay, “ on stage ” to talk about their relationships with the company, showing the buy-in from the biggest players in the industry. AMD will have to overcome Intel’s brand approach with Evo and vPro for greatest success. I think AMD will also have to find a way to deal with Intel’s debunking of its battery-powered performance and “RUGs” (Representative Usage Guides).
Overall, AMD has shown this CES that the company’s momentum is only gaining momentum in the mobile market and that the Zen 3 architecture is showing strength from low-power mobile to high-performance computing. Last year’s CES was a showcase of what AMD has achieved in its comeback in the competition and this year’s CES was a victory lap to show how far the company has really come. I hope to see more from AMD on the GPU front later this year and if the company’s overall momentum can help it overcome some of the challenges on the GPU front, even though I believe the RDNA 2 architecture and 6800 XT are promising.
Note: Anshel Sag, senior analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, contributed to this note.
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