AMD reveals new Ryzen, A-series mobile CPUs

While probably not as exciting as the Radeon VII going toe-to-toe with NVIDIA's RTX cards, AMD also announced a slew of new mobile processors at CES 2019. Chief among these mobile processors is the 2nd generation Ryzen lineup, which features six different CPUs in all. Those processors will be joined by a new Athlon CPU and the 7th generation A-Series processors, which are being created for Chromebooks.

Let's dive into the 2nd generation Ryzen mobile processors first. The Ryzen 3000 series, as its being called, is built using AMD's 12nm process and promises up to 10 hours of video playback battery life (though obviously that's something that will vary depending on the machine). Onboard Vega graphics will support 4K HDR playback and what AMD describes as "smooth PC gaming," but of course, users will probably want a discrete graphics card for any serious gaming they're looking. Here's a quick rundown of all six processors in the 3000 series:

• AMD Ryzen 3 3200U: 2 cores, 4 threads; 15W; 2.6GHz (base)/3.5GHz (boost); 3 GPU cores; 5MB L2+L3 Cache

• AMD Ryzen 3 3300U: 4 cores, 4 threads; 15W; 2.1GHz (base)/3.5GHz (boost); 6 GPU cores; 6MB L2+L3 Cache

• AMD Ryzen 5 3500U: 4 cores, 8 threads; 15W; 2.1GHz (base)/3.7GHz (boost); 8 GPU cores; 6MB L2+L3 Cache

• AMD Ryzen 5 3550H: 4 cores, 8 threads; 35W; 2.1GHz (base)/3.7GHz (boost); 8 GPU cores; 6MB L2+L3 Cache

• AMD Ryzen 7 3700U: 4 cores, 8 threads; 15W; 2.3GHz (base)/4.0GHz (boost); 10 GPU cores; 6MB L2+L3 Cache

• AMD Ryzen 7 3750H: 4 cores, 8 threads; 35W; 2.3GHz (base)/4.0GHz (boost); 10 GPU cores; 6MB L2+l3 Cache

AMD says that these processors will feature in ultrathin and gaming notebooks from a variety of partners beginning in Q1 2019. Partners who are on board and have notebooks in the works include Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, Huawei, Lenovo, and Samsung, which is quite the list. For mainstream notebooks, AMD also has the Athlon 300U, which is a dual-core, four thread CPU using Vega graphics and clocked at 2.4GHz.

Then we have the 7th generation A-series, which is comprised of two processors: the dual-core, 1.6GHz A4-9120C, and the dual-core, 1.8GHz A6-9220C. A-series CPUs aren't exceedingly powerful, which makes them good fits for Chromebooks. In fact, these processors feature in two Chromebooks that were revealed during CES 2019 – Acer's Chromebook 315 and the HP Chromebook 14 – with AMD saying that more Chromebooks with these CPUs will be launching throughout the year.

So, it seems that Acer has a lot of hardware partners lined up to take advantage of these new mobile CPUs. We'll see what kind of notebooks they release as we move through 2019, so stay tuned for that, and in the meantime head to our CES 2019 hub for more from the show!