What we tested today is one of the AMD flagships for launch, the Ryzen 9 5980HS inside the ASUS ROG Flow X13. This is a sub-16mm ultraportable gaming laptop with a mid-range discrete GPU installed, an impressive 4K 16:10 Pantone certified IPS display, 32GB LPDDR4X memory and a 1 TB NVMe SSD. It also has an executive feel and design, indicating that both AMD and ASUS want to take this platform to its most premium customers. We’re leaving a full review of the laptop itself for a later date, let us focus on the performance of the processor inside.
The jump from Zen 2 to Zen 3 in the mobile space for AMD is more than just putting in the new cores. The cache adjustment from a split 4+4 MB L3 cache to a unified 16 MB L3 cache enables a better effective latency and less reliance on constantly going out to main memory – AMD is also aggressive on the L3 prefetching policies to drive performance. We can see that the single 8-core CCX has low core-to-core communication latency showcasing that enthusiast level workloads will benefit in more ways than one.
AMD is also piling on improvements to help with power, such as enabling different per-core voltage levels and a more efficient memory controller. Per-core voltage control is something that every modern CPU has to have (or at least islands of CPUs) in order to get the best battery performance. AMD is pairing this with its CPPC2 support, and users will benefit from very quick idle-to-turbo performance for immediate responsiveness.
For our benchmark suite, almost all of our benchmarks show an uplift for the new Ryzen 5000 Mobile series, some considerably so: our compile benchmark is +12%, Corona rendering is +18%, Dolphin emulation +17%, NAMD +8%, Blender +6%. To our surprise our SPEC2006 1T benchmark is +32%, accelerated considerably by the 16 MB L3 cache, but also because these CPUs also support a higher instantaneous power turbo modes than the previous generation. This enables some competitive performance numbers against Intel’s Tiger Lake platform in single thread focused tests (AMD wins on multithread quite easily).
All of these core updates, as well as design wins enabling better hardware under the hood, put AMD’s Ryzen 5000 Mobile series in good stead to power a generation of machines especially as more and more of us work from home. When Intel was in a period of high demand through 2018 and 2019, Intel focused on premium solutions to make the most revenue - Intel’s financials last week showed that the company was selling more and more education-focused low-end notebooks and Chromebooks, now that demand had reduced. We can apply something similar to AMD's current situtation - AMD’s silicon is in high demand for 2021, and so AMD’s target this year would appear to be more mid-range, premium commercial, and enthusiast machines. To reaffirm this, AMD has also promised that we will see notebooks this year paired with the most powerful mobile graphics cards, enabling high-performance gamers to move to AMD. No doubt we will have a number pass through our hands through the year, especially as they hit the shelves starting February.