AMD unveiled its Ryzen 5000 mobile processors at CES 2021, led by the HX series. It's a powerhouse for gaming, and with two new chips, the Ryzen 9 5900HX and Ryzen 9 5980HX, AMD thinks it has the silicon to make it happen if you want high-performance gaming in a portable package.

Both chips are 8-core, 16-thread mobile packages, which is something to drool over. The top-of-the-line chip, the Ryzen 9 5980HX, is clocked up to 4.8GHz, with 20MB of cache and a TDP of over 45W. All of these are built on the Zen 3 architecture, and all the advantages of that quick architecture are obvious. [AMD promises that gaming laptops will not be prevented from achieving more than 100 frames per second in Horizon: Horizon: Zero Dawn at 1080p on the game's native high quality preset. AMD promises. This is quite impressive for a mobile chip.

AMD also lightly mentioned 4K gaming capability, which I would believe if I saw it. Theoretically, the GPU should pull most of the gaming performance away from the CPU, and one of Nvidia's new RTX 30 series GPUs alongside it would certainly be a powerful combination.

AMD was a bit more reserved about gaming performance details, but the company did suggest a comparison of the CPU performance of the second Ryzen 9 5900HX with Intel's Core i9 10980HK, currently the company's top chip. Since this is not Intel's 11th generation Tiger Lake chip, the Zen 3 completely beats this chip in the single-threaded Cinebench R20 test, 13% faster by AMD's calculations; in Passmark's PT10 it is about 35% faster; in 3DMark's Fire Strike physical test, it is 19% faster.

We'll have to see for ourselves how they compare to Intel's latest offerings, but it seems clear that AMD has a firm grip on the mobile market it has pioneered over the past few years and plans to grow it even further in 2021.

We certainly look forward to seeing these chips.