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Happy new year and all that, as CES would be raging on, COVID has taken it down a few pegs. Even with major companies ditching the event to keep employees safe, AMD and NVIDIA still plan to announce everything slated for 2022 in their usual fashion – in a keynote.
Zen 3+: Ryzen 7 5800X3D
Zen 4 will be their next leap up in generations but will follow the Spring 2022 release of the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, AMD’s high-performance CPU that will take advantage of 3D V-Cache. This V-Cache works in tandem with the L3 Cache on the upcoming CPUs, adding additional performance by essentially tripling the L3 cache’s speed from 64MB to 192MB. This uses the current AM4 slots on motherboards.
Zen 4 Raphael
From the announcements, AMD’s timeline for 2022 appears to layout that they’re gunning for the next version of their Zen architecture to launch sometime in the second half of 2022, alongside their brand new socket for motherboards – AM5. Yes, you’ll need to do a full upgrade to get these.
The Zen 4 will launch alongside AMD’s 5nm technology, cramming even more performance into their CPUs by creating small and smaller components for the chips.
Zen 3+ Ryzen 6000 APU (Rembrandt)
AMD announced their new APU chips for notebooks, splitting the two into the familiar U and H naming structure.
The long and short of it is that the H-Series is made for Gamers and Creators. These will be in the expensive laptops. The U Series is for making those fancy-looking thin laptops actually usable past a year or two.
Both sets of chips will include RDNA 2, AMD’s graphics technology.
A leaked graph from VideoCardz has the full details with only the notable exceptions being low-end chips – Ryzen 3 5825U, 5625U, and 5425U – will not include the Zen 3+ and RDNA, AMD’s technology used in the PS5 and Xbox Series X and S, as well as their newer chips, designed to add hardware acceleration to Raytracing, shading and other functions needed for content creation or gaming.
They do claim that the chips will provide AAA gaming at 1080p, with no discrete graphics cards needed. This then launched into the usual CES flinging of specs at each of the other companies, with graphs and a quick glimpse at Far Cry 6 with FSR on to show that the laptop can handle its own with a medium preset.
While the U series will be for consumers, we’re more interested in the H-Series, which appears to feature multiple high-powered chips. They all have the Zen 3+ and RDNA 2 features, with the 6980HX and HS topping the list with a max boosted clock speed of 5GHz.
Zen3+ will bring the functionality that has been enjoyed on desktop like USB4, PCIe 4.0, DDR5 RAM, WI-FI 6E, and Bluetooth LE 5.2. AMD also plans to bring DisplayPort 2, HDMI 2.1, and an HDR pipeline via connectivity with OLED and Mini-LED monitors or TVs.
Other features touted in the presentation included the supposed 24 hours of battery life, as well as power management features to help assist in reaching this lofty goal. This includes working with the operating system to notice when things like streaming or video conferences to ensure ‘loud fans’ don’t interrupt your call or movie.
Radeon RX 6000 Series Graphics
In what can only be described as “what” and “oh”, AMD announced yet another GPU, gunning for NVIDIA’s stronghold over the mid to low-end gaming PC setups currently using the 1650 Ti card. Claiming it had over 50% of the market, the new Radeon RX6500 is aimed at getting them upgraded without the massive cost. Coming in at 199, it’ll be available from January 19th.
Then the company announced that they intended to release 18 different GPU models across the market in 2022. That’s up from the 8 last year. It’s getting hard to keep up, but AMD seems to be banking in on the FSR and Radeon Super Resolution to carry the weight of the lack of real power behind the low-end cards being presented right now.
Radeon Super Resolution
Using AMD’s Adrenaline software, allows you to take any game and boost its performance in a similar concept to FSR. However, while FSR is needed to be implemented per game, this forces any game to upscale from a lower resolution to the native display, while having the performance gains of using a lower resolution on a laptop or desktop.
AMD Advantage
AMD also announced ‘Advantage’, their new framework that is designed to assist in everything that has been stated above. This means it’ll assist with power draw from gaming unplugged for instance. When unplugged, the PC will automatically swap from the discrete GPU to the internal one, then back again. This means that you won’t suddenly see your laptop drop from 100% to 5% in the blink of an eye on the go.
AMD expects 20 or more designs to hit laptops over the coming year, with Alienware’s M17 RS to be the first out the door with their new laptop.
