AMD Announces Ryzen 3000 Processor Series For Ultrathin Notebooks

Leading up to CES, there were almost too many AMD leaks to even keep track of. I remember seeing mention of Ryzen 3000 series about a month ago, but the unlikeliness of a follow-up that quickly was so unbelievable that even AMD’s most ardent hopefuls weren’t naive enough to believe it was coming. Well… it was coming – just not in desktop form.

At CES, AMD has just announced its new Ryzen 3000 mobile series, debuting with support for 7 different SKUs, which isn’t counting two specific chips designed for Chromebooks. But first and foremost, let’s take a quick look at AMD’s mainstream notebook solutions:

Given that these are notebook chips, pricing isn’t being revealed to us lowly customers at this point in time, although that information is sure to come out at some point. Either way, there’s no chance any of these are going to be “expensive”, since AMD’s goal here is to give people the most refined notebook solution it’s ever made, and pricing the chips too high would mean adoption would be slow.

None of that is to say these chips themselves are slow. AMD has thankfully filled all three main Ryzen lines with two products a piece, as well as launching an Athlon for those with even simpler needs (I personally cringe at the thought of a 2-core processor in 2019, but they apparently have their audience). Clock speeds are not too shabby, either, peaking at 4.0GHz on the Ryzen 7 collection.

The top chips for both the Ryzen 5 and 7 lines are likely to grace some gaming notebooks, because their higher 35W TDP basically implies that they are meant to go into notebooks designed for getting actual work (or gaming) done, but that’ll be done retaining an ultrathin form-factor.

In addition to the chips for regular notebooks, AMD has also released two APU models designed for Google Chromebooks. Here, we have more 2-core processors, which is probably suitable enough for the target audience of the notebook. ChromeOS is very optimized for lower-power chips, so if you’ve wanted a Chromebook but have hated the lack of AMD, here you go.

Vendors are so far pleased as a peach with AMD’s offerings, with multiple companies providing some great quotes. Such as Vivien Lien, ASUS’ CMO: “We’re excited to announce the new ASUS FX505 and 705DY TUF Gaming notebooks, the first laptops powered by AMD’s Ryzen 7 3750H and Ryzen 5 3550H processor and discrete Radeon RX560X graphics, suited for high performance gaming on the go. It’s a unique solution that delivers best-in-class gaming experiences for a wide variety of users.”

The Chromebook chips are gettign some love as well, from Acer’s Chris Chiang, VP of Product Management: “The new Acer Chromebook 315 delivers great performance to let users do more with the growing selection of Android apps and Chrome extensions, thanks to award-winning Radeon graphics for a visually stunning experience and AMD processors that will tackle tasks quickly and reliably.”

So… when do these chips all arrive? Your guess is as good as ours, though we’d expect products to start rolling out this quarter, since AMD seems pretty aggressive in getting to market (and no one could blame it).