AMD Ryzen 6000 laptop chips claim 24-hour battery
AMD announced its new Ryzen 6000 Series mobile processors at CES on Tuesday. Laptops featuring the new processors are set to launch later in 2022 and AMD claims that the batteries in the new processors could offer up to 24 hours of battery life.
These claims are intriguing, especially when you consider that the average battery life of current laptops can range from as low as two or three hours to seven or even eight hours on a single charge. AMD says the claim is based on expected battery life from idling, video playback, standby mode, and some gaming versus the previous generation of mobile processors.
However, there are always other factors to consider when looking at the battery life of a laptop, including what kind of graphics card the laptop uses, what kind of power supply it's running, and just the general build quality of the product.
If AMD is able to deliver on anything close to that 24-hour claim, though, it could mean a huge leap forward for battery life in laptops as a whole, which is a win for laptop users everywhere.
The AMD Ryzen 6000 Series mobile processors are also notable as the first (so far) to offer Microsoft's Pluton security processor, beating out competitors Qualcomm and Intel. This security chip, which is designed to replace the TPM, is based on the security tech used to protect the latest Xbox game consoles. Back in November, Microsoft said it was working with multiple companies on bringing Pluton to their CPUs, including AMD.
Meet the AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT
But this new mobile processor isn't the only thing that AMD has been working on. The company also recently announced its AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT, the newest graphics card to join its lineup. The Radeon RX 6500 XT sports 64 texture units, 1,024 stream processors, and 5.4 B transistors. Additionally, it also offers 16 ray accelerators, and 16 compute units, with a boost frequency of up to 2,815 MHz and a max 4GB of RAM. It's not the most powerful card that AMD has put out, but it should offer solid FPS in many of today's top games.
What really sets the new Radeon RX 6500 XT apart, though, is its use of AMD's RDNA 2 architecture. This GPU architecture is the same as that featured in the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, and it offers support for high-resolution features like ray-tracing and AMD's Fidelity FX visual technology. The RX 6500 XT also makes use of AMD's new Navi 24 GPU structure on top of a 6nm node, according to AnandTech. The new desktop GPU is set to release on January 19 and will retail for just $199 when it becomes available.
If you're looking for a cheaper GPU option to play games at 1080p, then the RX 6500 XT could be a solid option. Of course, there are still other budget-friendly options out there, like the upcoming Nvidia RTX 3050, so make sure you find something that works for you and offers the performance and quality that you want from a graphics card.