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New AMD laptops bring up to 30 hours of battery life

AMD has just launched a new series of APUs, dubbed the Ryzen Pro 6000. The new chips are said to deliver outstanding battery life of up to 30 hours.

The company is also releasing a host of Ryzen Pro 5000 APUs that are based on a different architecture.

AMD Ryzen Pro laptop APU.
AMD

AMD’s latest releases are all made for professionals, as well as users who simply need top-notch performance from a laptop. The new chips are APUs, meaning they contain both the processor and the graphics card. The Ryzen 6000 Pro series is based on the 6nm Zen 3+ architecture combined with the latest RDNA 2 graphics, while the 5000 Pro series was built based on the 7nm Zen 3 process and comes with Vega graphics instead.

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The lineup is going to be segmented, with the H-series laptops bringing maximum performance with higher power consumption ranging from 35 to 45 watts, and the U series focusing strongly on balancing clock speeds and keeping the wattage low. U-series laptops will offer much more modest power consumption ranging between 15 and 35 watts.

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The Rembrandt-based 6000 Pro series will offer an improvement in both battery efficiency and overall performance compared to the Cezanne Ryzen Pro 5000 lineup. AMD promises to deliver a whopping 30 hours of battery life on laptops running the Ryzen 7 Pro 6850 APU, and this includes more than just the most basic tasks — AMD specifically mentioned video playback as well.

AMD has shared a few slides about the processors, comparing the Ryzen 7 Pro 5850U to the Ryzen 7 Pro 6850U running at the same low power (15 watts), and the 5850U at 15 watts versus the 6850U model at 28 watts. The performance gains are clearly visible when it comes to both CPU and GPU performance, although the biggest boost is to be found in the graphics card.

AMD Ryzen Pro lineup performance comparison.
AMD

The 6850U is, unsurprisingly, the undeniable winner in these tests, which AMD conducted itself in a number of benchmark programs, including 3DMark for the GPU. The GPU performance of the APU has proven itself to be quite excellent, beating the Ryzen 7 Pro 5850U by 50% at the base power consumption level and by 110% at its maximum TDP. The CPU gains are not quite as substantial, but still notable.

As shared by Wccftech, the lineups include various APU models ranging from the high-end Ryzen 9 Pro 6950H with eight cores, 16 threads, and a boost clock of up to 4.9GHz paired with the Radeon 680M, to the more budget-friendly Ryzen 5 Pro 6650U with Radeon 660M graphics. However, as these laptops are going to be made for the premium segment, it’s possible that even the lower-end offering won’t be cheap.

AMD has teamed up with HP and Lenovo on the creation of these laptops, and we can expect to see new Lenovo ThinkPads and ThinkBooks, as well as HP EliteBooks and ProBooks, to start appearing on the market soon. No official dates and prices have been shared as of yet.

Monica J. White
Monica is a computing writer at Digital Trends, focusing on PC hardware. Since joining the team in 2021, Monica has written…
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