AMD's new Ryzen 9 5900HX laptop chip topples Intel's top CPU for portable gaming

AMD has announced its Ryzen 5000 mobile processors, led by the HX-series, over at CES 2021. And they're seriously beefy for gaming. With two new chips, the Ryzen 9 5900HX and Ryzen 9 5980HX, if you want high performance gaming in a portable package AMD reckons it has the silicon to do it.

Both chips come with eight cores and 16 threads in a mobile package, which is already something worth salivating over. The top chip, the Ryzen 9 5980HX, is clocked the highest at 4.8GHz and comes with 20MB of cache and a 45W+ TDP. That's all built on the Zen 3 architecture, so all the benefits of that swift architecture are a given. 

And where does that top chip get you? AMD's promising it won't hold back a gaming laptop from reaching over 100 frames per second in Horizon: Zero Dawn at the game's native high quality preset and 1080p. That's pretty darn impressive for a mobile chip. 

AMD even lightly touched on 4K gaming capabilities, but I'll believe it when I see it. In theory, that should see the GPU take the brunt of gaming performance off the CPU, and one of Nvidia's new RTX 30-series GPUs alongside would certainly make for a powerful pairing.

AMD was a little light on the gaming performance details, but the company has alluded to some CPU performance for the second-run Ryzen 9 5900HX versus Intel's Core i9 10980HK, its top chip right now. That's not one of Intel's 11th Gen Tiger Lake chips, and so Zen 3 absolutely demolishes that chip in single-threaded Cinebench R20 testing, coming in 13% faster by AMD's making. In Passmark PT10, it's coming in some 35% faster, and in 3DMark's Fire Strike physics test that's 19% faster.

We'll have to see for ourselves how that stacks up versus Intel's latest offerings, but it sure looks like AMD's got a firm grip on the mobile market its clawed over the past few years, and only has plans to grow that further in 2021. 

I'm looking forward to taking a look at these chips, that's for sure.