AMD Ryzen 9 5980HS Cezanne Review: Ryzen 5000 Mobile Tested
by Dr. Ian Cutress on January 26, 2021 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- AMD
- Vega
- Ryzen
- Zen 3
- Renoir
- Notebook
- Ryzen 9 5980HS
- Ryzen 5000 Mobile
- Cezanne
Focusing on Premium Experiences
The issue with AMD’s notebook strategy through the 2010s was that most users saw the brand as a budget implementation, with low performance and low specifications. Both AMD and its OEM partners were complicit in assisting this projection, using 1366x768 TN screens and slow mechanical hard drives. There were a number of negative feedback loops preventing a nice AMD mobile system from hitting the market, and the only key design wins were from mass corporate sales. With the launch of the first Ryzen Mobile towards the end of the decade, AMD finally had a performance product worthy of attention, and the company has had a steady improvement generation-on-generation, convincing its OEM partners to come along and take advantage of the performance uplift for their customers.
AMD’s historic lows in that 2010 decade were performance, specifications, and battery life. With Ryzen 4000 Mobile, from last generation, AMD had a product that could dispel all those assumptions, and we saw critical acclaim put upon devices like the Lenovo Slim 7 Yoga, and the ASUS Zephyrus G14. From our review of the new generation today, Ryzen 5000 Mobile, the whole strategy that AMD is playing has finally come into focus.
AMD stated that the new generation Ryzen 5000 Mobile processors were in the lab and up-and-running only two months after Ryzen 4000 Mobile launched. AMD made both sets of processors pin-compatible, allowing OEM partners to build designs that could be used for either processor family. The key here that I’ve realized is that AMD’s ultimate goal with these was to build a strong Ryzen 5000 Mobile family, and Ryzen 4000 Mobile was an option for partners to take baby steps, but the main goal was Ryzen 5000, with Zen 3. AMD’s statement of already having over 150+ system designs in the works with Ryzen 5000 Mobile, another +50% over the previous generation, along with this strategy of having a regular predictable cadence of products through re-use of different hardware elements showcases why Ryzen 5000 Mobile is important to the company. With AMD’s recent supply issues as well, we’re of the opinion that AMD has been stockpiling these Ryzen 5000 Mobile processors in order to enable a strong Q1 and Q2 launch of the platform with stock for all OEMs.
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.
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Tomatotech - Thursday, January 28, 2021 - link
Wrong. Check Wikipedia - 2013 MacBook Pros were available from Apple with 1TB SSDs. They’re still good even now as you can replace that 2013 Apple SSD with a modern NVME SSD for a huge speed up.And yes Apple supported the NVMe standard before it was even a standard. It wasn’t finalised by 2013 so these macs need a $10 hardware adaptor in the m.2 bay to physically take the NVMe drive but electronically and on the software level NVME is fully supported.
Kuhar - Thursday, January 28, 2021 - link
Sorry but you are wrong or don`t understand what stock means. On Apple`s own website states clearly that MBP 2013 had STOCK 256 gb SSD with OPTION to upgrade to as high as 1 tb SSD. So maybe your Apple lies again and wiki is ofc correct. On top of that: bragging about 1 tb SSD when in PC world you could get 2 tb SSD in top machines isn`t rellay something to brag about.GreenReaper - Saturday, January 30, 2021 - link
Stock means that they were in stock, available from the manufacturer for order. Which is fair to apply in this case. Most likely they didn't have any SSD in them until they were configured upon sale.What you're thinking of is base. At the same time, it's fair to call out as an unfair comparison, because they are cited as the standard/base configuration of this model, where it wasn't for the MBP
grant3 - Wednesday, January 27, 2021 - link
1. Worrying about what was standard 7 years ago as if it's relevant to what people need today is silly2. TB SSDs were probably about $600-$700 in 2013. If you spent that much to upgrade your MBP, good for you, that doesn't mean it's the best use of funds for everyone.
Makste - Wednesday, January 27, 2021 - link
It is a good review thank you Dr. Ian.My concern is, and has always been the fact that, CPU manufacturers make beefier iGPUs on higher core count CPUs which is not right/fair in my view, because higher core count CPUs and most especially the H series are most of the time bundled with a dGPU, while lower core count CPUs may or may not be bundled with a dGPU. I think lower core count APUs would sell much better if the iGPUs on lower core count CPUs are made beefier because they have enough die space for this, I suppose, in order to satisfy clients who can only afford lower core count CPUs which are not paired with a dGPU. It's a bit of a waste of resources in my view to give 8 vega cores to a ryzen 9 5980HS which is going to be paired with a dgpu and only 6 vega cores to a ryzen 3 5300 whose prospects of being paired with a dGPU are limited.
I don't know what you think about this, but if you agree, then it'd be helpful if you managed to get them to reconsider. Thanks.
Spunjji - Thursday, January 28, 2021 - link
I get your point here, and I agree that it would be a nice thing to have - a 15W 4-core CPU with fully-enabled iGPU would be lovely. Unfortunately it doesn't make much sense from AMD's perspective - they only have one chip design, and they want to get as much money as possible for the fully-enabled ones. It would also add a lot of complexity to their product lineup to have some models that have more CPU cores and fewer GPU CUs, and some that reversed the balance. It's easier for them just to have one line-up that goes from worst to best. :/Makste - Thursday, January 28, 2021 - link
Yes. It could be that, they are sticking with their original plan from the time they decided to introduce iGPUs to X86. But, I don't see why they can't make an overhaul to their offerings now that they are also on top. They could still offer 8 vega dies from the beginning of the series to the top most 8 core cpu offering. And those would be the high end offerings.Then, the other mid and low end variants would be those without the fully enabled vega dies. This way, nothing would be wasted and cezanne would then have a multitude of offerings, I believe people, even at this moment, would like to own a piece of cezanne, be it 3 cores or 5 cores. I think it's the customer to decide what is valuable and what is not valuable. Black and white thinking won't do (that cores will only sell if they are in even numbers). They should simply offer everything they have especially since their design can allow them to do so and more so now that there are supply constraints.
Spunjji - Friday, January 29, 2021 - link
The problem is that it's not just about what the end-user might want. AMD's customers are the OEMs, and the OEMs don't want to build a range of laptops with several dozen CPU options in it, because then they have to keep stock of all of those processors and try to guess the right amount of laptops to build with each different option. It's just not efficient for them. Unfortunately, what you're asking for isn't likely to happen.Makste - Friday, January 29, 2021 - link
Sigh... I realise the cold hard truth now that you've put it more bluntly....An OEM has to fill this gap.
Spunjji - Thursday, January 28, 2021 - link
I might be in the market for a laptop later this year, and it's nice to know that unlike the jump from Zen+ to Zen 2, the newer APUs are better but not *devastatingly so*. I might be able to pick up something using a 4000 series APU on discount and not feel like I'm missing out, but if funds allow I can go for a new device with a 5000 APU and know that I'm getting the absolute best mobile x86 performance per watt/dollar on the market. Either way, it's good to see that the Intel/Nvidia duopoly is finally being broken in a meaningful way.I do have one request - it would be nice to get a separate article with a little more analysis on Tiger Lake in shipping devices vs. the preview device they sent you. Your preview model appears to absolutely annihilate its own very close retail cousin here, and I'd love to see some informed thoughts on how and why that happens. I really don't like the fact that Intel seeded reviewers with something that, in retrospect, appears to significantly over-represent the performance of actually shipping products. It would be good to know whether that's a fluke or something you can replicate consistently - and, if it's the latter, for that to be called out more prominently.
Regardless, thanks for the efforts. It's good to see AMD maintaining good pace. When they get around to slapping RDNA 2 into a future APU, I might finally go ahead and replace my media centre with something that can game!