AMD Ryzen 5000 processors revealed for laptops

AMD has revealed a new line of mobile processors which are a shoo-in to start powering the best gaming laptops in the next few months.

During the company's CES 2021 keynote, AMD revealed both a new line of AMD Ryzen 5000 series mobile processors and the extra high-end HX Series. These are the first mobile CPUs to use AMD's latest-generation Zen 3 architecture, letting them provide performance that was previously only available in a desktop form factor.

AMD says the first laptops powered by Ryzen 5000 mobile chips will start rolling out from major companies including ASUS, HP, and Lenovo starting in the first quarter of this year - so in other words, by the end of March. According to AMD, its new top-of-the-line AMD Ryzen 9 5980HX processor will offer up to 23% faster single-threaded performance and 17% faster multi-threaded performance compared to the last generation, so you should expect to see some appreciable gains even if you're planning to move up from a fairly recent system.

One thing we didn't hear much about at the AMD keynote was its line of Radeon GPUs. While the company is rapidly closing its graphical performance gap with Nvidia, AMD's new line of Radeon 6000 series cards have been nearly impossible to find since they launched last year. I was hoping we might get an update on their supply situation, but it looks like we'll just need to keep refreshing our preferred retailers for the time being.

This year's AMD graphics cards and CPUs were incredibly popular but stock was very hard to come by; our guides on where to buy AMD RX 6900 XT, where to buy AMD RX 6800 graphics cards, and where to buy AMD Ryzen 5000 CPUs will help but luck is still the name of the game.