CES 2022: AMD announces mobile Ryzen 6000 CPUs and new Radeon GPUs

Digital render of AMD Ryzen CPU sitting in motherboard.

(Image credit: AMD)

At CES 2022, AMD unveiled its new 6000 Series mobile CPUs featuring its Zen 3 Plus architecture and a selection of fresh GPUs during today’s (Jan.4) Product Premiere livestream event.

AMD stated that its Ryzen 6000 Series laptop chips are the fastest yet. Built on TSMC’s 6nm process with clock speeds of up to 5GHz, these chips can achieve up to 1.3 times faster processing speeds and 2.1 times faster graphics than the 5000 Series. Not only that, AMD claims they’ll help devices achieve up to 24 hours of battery life. The chips’ eight performance cores allow for 16 threads of processing power, providing an 11% boost to single-thread performance and 28% faster multithread performance over last generation’s chips.

Of AMD’s mobile processors, the Ryzen 9 6980HX is the company’s biggest and baddest laptop CPU for 2022. The H-Series, unlike the U-Series, is for gamers and creators as opposed to thin and light machines. Either way, the 6980HX rocks eight cores with 16 threads, a base 3.3GHz clock and a boosted max speed of 5GHz. Weirdly, AMD claims that the 6980HX is the "fastest AMD Ryzen processor yet," which is technically true as the desktop grade Ryzen 9 5950X has a max clock speed of 4.9GHz. But we’d be willing to bet that last year’s top-end Ryzen desktop CPU will outperform this year’s fastest Ryzen laptop CPU.

The Radeon RX 6000M GPUs are more powerful and designed to help laptops achieve great gaming performance at resolutions up to 1440p. These new GPUs will offer up to 7% faster performance over last year’s 5000-series chips.

On the lighter side will sit the AMD Radeon RX 6000S series of mobile GPUs, which are a bit less powerful than the RX 6000M series and designed for ultraportable thin-and-light laptops. AMD claims that these GPUs can help deliver great gaming performance in machines weighing less than 4.5lbs (light, for a gaming laptop) that can be up to 20% thinner than their predecessors. AMD projects that the RX 6000S series laptop GPUs can help gamers achieve up to 100fps of 1080p gaming with max settings on thin-and-light devices, though we’ll have to get some in for testing before we’ll know for sure.

Lastly, AMD has expanded its Radeon graphics portfolio with a collection of budget GPUs, which we already expected would show up this month.

While these additions to the Radeon lineup are far from the most powerful cards on the market, it’s nevertheless nice to see more options available during a time when decent GPUs are increasingly difficult to find at reasonable prices.

According to AMD, the RX 6500 XT desktop GPU delivers 35% faster gaming performance at 1080p resolution than Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1650. That’s a budget card Nvidia released years ago, so it’s not exactly exciting that AMD’s new (budget) GPU blows it out of the water. But while it’s not exactly a powerhouse, the 6500 XT (along with the lighter RX 6400 that’s shipping to OEMs) is built on the 6nm process, meaning there’s greater efficiency per watt.

For the 6500 XT, AMD’s spec sheet says gamers can expect max setting 1080p frame rates of 108fps for Resident Evil Village, 78fps for Halo Infinite and 91fps for Apex Legends. For a $199 price, that’s solid 1080p gaming performance.

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Billy Givens is a journalist with nearly two decades of experience in editing and writing across a wide variety of topics. He focuses particularly on games coverage for Tom's Guide and other sites including From Gamers Magazine, Retroware, Game Rant and TechRaptor. He's also written for self-improvement sites such as Lifehack and produced in-depth analyses on subjects such as health, psychology and entertainment.