After being showcased at CES 2022 for the first time, AMD has now officially released the Ryzen 6000 Mobile. What's new about the processor for the laptop?
The Ryzen 6000 Mobile is based on a completely new APU design. Everything is updated, from the Zen 3+ CPU cores, to the integrated RDNA 2 GPU, to DDR5 support and more.
Previously, AMD's APU was fairly old-school from its various features and support. Including Vega's longstanding integrated GPU support. With this update in Ryzen 6000, the Ryzen APU should be able to compete with the 12th generation Intel processors.
The architectural change from Zen 3 to Zen 3+ is one of the big improvements to this processor. AMD calls this a very efficient core. So AMD focused on reducing power consumption and optimizing for efficiency.
According to AMD, the increase in performance in the IPC (instruction per cycle) sector is not too big. Plus, the cache layout is the same in L3 16MB and L2 4MB, as quoted by Techspot, Friday (18/2/2022).
Improvements in the efficiency sector are carried out by reducing leakage and power management. AMD claims that there are 50 changes in Zen 3+ compared to Zen 3 for the sake of efficiency.
However, efficiency is also helped by the change in fabrication of the N7 to N6 (both belonging to TSMC), which provides an improved performance vs. power ratio thanks to the use of EUV coating in the production process. Although the actual change in fabrication from 7nm to 6nm is not too big.
AMD claims the battery life of the laptop with the Ryzen 6000U is 8% longer in Windows when idle, 12% in modern standby, and 17% when playing video, all compared to the 5000U processor, which both have a TDP of 15W.
At CES, AMD claims that its power consumption is also 30% more efficient for video conferencing, 15% for browsing with Chrome, and so on.
Then in the GPU sector, RDNA 2 is available in two configuration options. Namely the Radeon 680M on Ryzen 7 and Radeon 660M on Ryzen 5. The difference is 12 vs 6 compute units, and clock speed of 2.4GHz vs 1.9GHz.
Ryzen 6000 Mobile also supports USB4 with various features, such as PCIe over USB, 240W power delivery, various display protocols, and others. AMD USB4 also supports Thunderbolt devices.