AMD Launches Ryzen Pro 6000 Series Chips

AMD is preparing for a new swath of business notebooks. The company today announced its new Ryzen Pro 6000 series processors, which use Zen 3+ cores and integrated RDNA 2 graphics. The company is also keeping some older Ryzen Pro 5000 chips around.

There are six Ryzen Pro 6000 H-series chips, ranging from the six-core/12-thread Ryzen 6 Pro 6650H and 6650HS up to the Ryzen 9 Pro 6950H and 6950HS. There are two U-series processors, the Ryzen 5 Pro 6650U and the Ryzen 7 Pro 6850U.

To demonstrate performance, AMD provided information about its U-series processors. It claims that at 15W, the 6850U offers 1.1x the CPU performance of the last-gen 5850U, while at 28W, it delivers a 1.3x increase. On the GPU side, it's a 1.5x and 2.1x increase, respectively.

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AMD also compared its chips with Intel, putting a Lenovo ThinkPad Z13 with a Ryzen 7 Pro 6860Z (an exclusive chip for that system, not listed in the chart above), 32GB of LPPDR5-6400 RAM and a 1TB SSD against a ThinkPad X1 Carbon with a Core i7-1260P, 16GB of LPDDR5-5500 RAM and a 1TB SSD. There, AMD claims approximately 25% faster multi-thread performance in Cinebench R23, roughly 50% better scores in Passmark 10, as well as faster graphics in 3DMark Time Spy. Single-core Cinebench scores were worse than the Intel chip. In a test that ran a Teams video call while also using the UL Procyon Office productivity benchmarks, AMD claimed it was up to 17% faster. 

AMD is making bombastic battery life claims, and suggests the Ryzen 7 Pro 6850U can run video playback for 29 hours in an unnamed laptop with a Ryzen 7 Pro 6850U processor with the display set to 150 nits. AMD claims an HP EliteBook 865 G9 with a 6850U and a 76 WHr battery ran for over 26 hours on the MobileMark 2018 battery life test.

These chips will be in laptops like the upcoming Lenovo ThinkPad Z13 and Z16, which will have an exclusive Ryzen 7 Pro 6860Z, as well as the upcoming HP EliteBook G9 which will come in 13, 14 and 16-inch sizes. The company announced that another ThinkBook and ThinkPads from Lenovo and ProBooks and EliteBooks from HP will also carry the new Ryzen 6000 and 5000 series chips. Other laptop manufacturers will also have options this year, I'm told, but no specific models were announced.

Those systems are expected to start launching sometime in Q2 of 2022.

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