AMD's announcement of mobile processors at CES 2021 was one of the best-kept secrets in the industry, so it was no surprise, but what was a surprise was the announcement of a new brand: in addition to traditional low-power CPUs like the 5800U, AMD announced its laptop announced its HX line of CPUs. The intent of this new brand was also fairly clear, as Dr. Lisa Su stated, "Our new HX processors raise the bar as gaming processors."

Designed to be the fastest processor for gaming notebooks, the HX notebook processor uses the same Zen 3 architecture found in the Ryzen 9 5900X and other products, leaving the cores unlocked for overclocking and sustained performance. The thermal rating is increased to achieve this. Basically, this is going to be a very attractive product for laptop gaming.

Dr. Lisa Su presented two chips in the HX family, the Ryzen 9 5900HX and Ryzen 9 5980HX. Both are 8-core, 16-thread monsters with a combined 20MB of L2+L3 cache and a TDP of over 45W. 5900HX boosts to 4.6GHz, while 5980HX boosts to 4.8GHz.

AMD has released Horizon Zero Dawn running at 1080p and over 100 fps on this chip. However, it is not clear from this video which GPU was used to run the benchmark. There is no way that integrated graphics could achieve such frame rates.

AMD concluded by saying that laptops with the new Ryzen 5000 mobile chips will be available by February. We assume this will include HX processors, but we will have to wait for announcements from notebook partners over the next few days to see if this is true.

AMD appears to be in a great place for gaming laptops right now. Let's see what laptops will adopt this new chip.